As terrified passengers fled the burning Air France jet, Guy Ledez stood atop a muddy ravine, pulling survivors from the wreckage.
He then ran on board the burning wreckage of Flight 358 to make sure no one was left behind. The 37-year-old airport rental car manager says he didn't have time to stop and think of danger when he witnessed the crash during a routine Tuesday afternoon.
By Wednesday, his name had been widely circulated across Canada, as media hailed him as a hero who risked his life to save many stunned passengers, all of whom survived the doomed flight from Paris.
It began at around 4pm when he was driving along the airport road, parallel to the descending aircraft in a heavy storm that had prompted a "red alert" at Pearson International Airport on the outskirts of Toronto.
He believes lightning might have struck the aircraft.
"There was all this lightning right on it, and then there was smoke, and then the plane just disappeared" down a ravine, he said.
Though other cars on the airport road quickly U-turned to get away from the crash, he drove his toward the top of the gully slick with rain.
"I looked down and there's just a sea of people trying to get up," he said. "I had two babies passed to me."
He and another bystander -- whose name he never learned -- pulled survivors to safety and then went down to help some elderly passengers up the ravine.
Not knowing whether injured survivors remained on board, he said, the two men scrambled up the emergency slide at the tail of the plane. Each took an aisle and did a sweep to make sure nobody had been left behind.
All 309 passengers and crew had remarkably escaped serious harm.
The other unknown good Samaritan jumped out and landed safely. Just as Ledez headed toward an exit, he heard an explosion from the back of the plane, one that ultimately ripped the aircraft into pieces.
He jumped and ran for his life. Only then did he realize how much danger he had escaped.
"That sort of woke me up," he said. "That's when the reality set in."
Ledez and the other man met up with the pilot and other passengers and ran to safety by the Highway 401, Canada's busiest freeway, where they were met by emergency officials.
No emergency personnel remembered Ledez specifically on Wednesday, but they do remember seeing passersby who stopped to help. Ledez's hands bore the wounds from where he climbed over a barbed-wire fence to get to the plane.
As the adrenaline wore off, his back began to ache as he and others waited along the highway. He was taken on the emergency buses along with the passengers to the terminal to talk to investigators.
Later that night, Ledez lay awake in bed replaying the crash, the explosion, and thinking about what could have happened. He doesn't know what to think about being called a hero.
"There was no thinking involved, just, `I gotta go help,' so boom, I did it," he said Wednesday, sitting at a picnic table at the airport. Ledez, who is single, hopes his life gets back to normal, after all the media attention.
"I'll have the same job. I'll have the same friends," he said.
Ledez always wanted to be a police officer and even studied law enforcement in college for a while. But the Budget job offered a steady paycheck and he worked his way up the company ranks over the passt 10 years.
Besides, he likes working at the airport -- because he can watch the planes take off and land.
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