A military chartered jet carrying 143 people landed hard, then bounced and swerved as the pilot struggled to control it amid thunder and lightning, ultimately skidding off the runway and coming to a crashing halt in a river at Naval Air Station Jacksonville in Florida.
It meant chaos and terror for passengers in the Boeing 737 as the plane jolted back and forth and oxygen masks deployed, then overhead bins opened, sending contents spilling out.
However, authorities said all the people onboard emerged without critical injuries on Friday night, lining up on the wings as they waited to be rescued.
Only a 3-month-old baby was hospitalized, and that was done out of an abundance of caution, officials said.
“I think it is a miracle,” said Captain Michael Connor, the base’s commanding officer, hours after the plane landed. “We could be talking about a different story this evening.”
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sent a team of investigators on Saturday to the crash site in St Johns River in north Florida, where the aircraft was still partially submerged in shallow water and its nose cone was sliced off, apparently from the impact.
Two pet cats and a dog were still on the plane as well, and their status was not immediately clear.
Investigators are to examine the aircraft, the environment and human factors in trying to discover why the plane rolled into the river.
The flight took off on Friday from the US military base in Cuba with 136 passengers and seven crew members. It was a regular charter run by Miami Air International, which has many military contracts.
Among those onboard was Cheryl Bormann, a defense attorney, who described the chaotic landing.
The plane “literally hit the ground and then it bounced. It was clear that the pilot did not have complete control of the plane because it bounced some more, it swerved and tilted left and right,” she told CNN. “The pilot was trying to control it but couldn’t, and then all of a sudden it smashed into something.”
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