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The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) says it’s launching an investigation after a WestJet flight from Toronto made a “hard landing” at an airport in the Caribbean country of St. Maarten Sunday afternoon.
Passengers and crew had to be evacuated from WestJet Flight 2276 after its landing at Princess Juliana International Airport, the airline said in a statement Sunday.
Video of the incident showed billowing smoke after the plane made contact with the runway.
A WestJet plane made a “hard landing” at an airport in the Caribbean country of St. Maarten, the airline said on Sunday, but no passengers were reported injured.
WestJet said Sunday all passengers had been accounted for and nobody had reported any injuries. Reached by email on Monday, a spokesperson for the airline did not share any additional details.
The federal agency said in a statement Monday it would be sending investigators to St. Maarten to gather information on what happened.
The airport said on social media the plane did not catch fire and also said there were no injuries, but noted that three people were “taken for medical evaluation” as a precaution.
‘Something ain’t right’
A St. Maarten-based livestreamer and ex-airplane mechanic told The Canadian Press he’d never witnessed something as disruptive as the hard landing at the Caribbean island’s iconic airport.
Jacco Steffens, co-founder of content and streaming website SHOWME Caribbean, said he was remotely operating a web camera pointed at the airport and streaming on YouTube as usual on Sunday — that is, until he went to zoom into the WestJet landing.
“I said, ‘Something ain’t right,'” Steffens recalled.
An archived livestream of the airport’s runway captured by Steffen’s webcam shows the moment the WestJet flight made its final approach. The plane can be seen flying low over bright blue waters before landing roughly on its right landing gear and coming to a stop.
“I thought first that it probably just busted a tire or something, but then when I saw it sliding and the smoke was coming up, I realized that the engine was on the ground, so it was more than a blown tire,” he said.
