An Air Canada flight attendant survived a terrifying crash at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night, miraculously being thrown over 300 feet from the plane after it collided with a fire truck — thanks to the “durable” design of her jump seat, according to a safety expert.
Solange Tremblay was in her jump seat, built to endure crashes, when Flight 8646 struck a Port Authority fire truck responding to an emergency around 11:40 p.m.
The force of the collision sent Tremblay flying roughly 300 feet, her daughter said — yet she escaped with only a fractured leg.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former federal crash investigator, said Tremblay escaped largely unscathed because of the special seat, which has a four-point restraint.
“The flight attendant’s seat is kind of a jump seat that folds down and is bolted to the wall, the same wall that the cockpit utilizes,” said Guzzetti.
“It’s a very robust seat,” he added. “It’s designed to withstand probably more crash loads than passenger seats because you need the flight attendant to help passengers get out of an airplane after a crash.”
Tremblay’s daughter, Sarah Lepine, told Canadian news station TVA Nouvelles that what happened to her mother was a “total miracle.”
“At the moment of impact, her seat was ejected more than 100 meters (328 feet) from the plane. They found her and she was still strapped into her seat,” she said.
The pilot, Antoine Forest, and co-pilot, Mackenzie Gunther, were killed instantly when the front of the plane rammed into the emergency vehicle on Runway 4.
Harrowing video captured the jet barreling into the truck, leaving it completely mangled and obliterating the front of the aircraft.
Forty-one of the 76 passengers and crew members aboard the plane were hospitalized with injuries, most of them minor, officials said.
The fire truck had been cleared to cross the runway as it responded to a separate emergency on board a different plane that had just aborted its takeoff.
An air traffic controller was heard admitting he “messed up” soon after the crash.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.
NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said Tuesday it’s likely there were “multiple failures” that led to the fatal incident, and that it was “too early” to pin the blame solely on the controller.
“We have found in all of our investigations that it is not a single error that led to a terrible tragedy,” Homendy told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
