A fuel truck driver at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport has been charged with dangerous driving after his truck ran into the front left side of an Air Canada Express Dash-8 Friday. The truck collapsed the fuselage below the captain’s seat on the regional airliner as it was taxiing to the gate about 1:30 a.m. The pilots, a flight attendant and two passengers were taken to a local hospital for a check while the remaining passengers were assessed on the scene by paramedics. There was no fire.
The aircraft may be a write-off and the incident capped an already stressful flight for the occupants. The plane was originally headed for Sudbury, about an hour away, but turned back because of fog. “It hit the front of the aircraft, threw the aircraft in one direction, it spunthe opposite way, and it looks like either the front or the rear of it hit the back of the airplane,” passenger Paul Frontczak told the CBC. “It stopped pretty quickly, but then we started to smell aviation fuel and that’s when panic started,” he said. “Everyone was like, we got to get out—we got to get out like now.”
