WATCH ABOVE: Air Canada chief operating officer Klaus Goersch talks about the Air Canada flight and is asked about hard landings.
TORONTO – Air Canada flight 624 crashed at Halifax International Airport on Sunday, sending 25 people to hospital.
Officials, at first, didn’t call it a crash, insisting instead that the incident was a “hard landing.”
So what is a hard landing? A hard landing occurs when the plane hits the ground with more force than usual.
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Joseph Yeremain, the president of Thermodyne Engineering and a board member on the Ontario Aerospace Council, said hard landings can damage the plane.
READ MORE: A look at Air Canada’s safety record
Yeremain noticed one of the plane’s wings was broken and suggested it, and the plane’s underbelly, may have hit the ground during the landing.
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“When it’s a hard landing, the weight of the engine and the weight of the wing results in a big shock, and that big shock could have broken the wing and the engine is attached to the wing, so that’s another possibility,” Yeremain said.
![HALIFAX HARD LANDING 2](http://cponline.thecanadianpress.com/graphics/2015/static/cp-halifax-hard-landing-2.jpg)
AC624 had 133 passengers and five crew members on board when it hit the runway at Halifax International Airport. It’s believed the plane hit a power line before skidding.
Klaus Goersch, the chief operating officer at Air Canada, called the incident a hard landing at first, noting it had not been dubbed a crash by the Transportation Safety Board.
He suggested the difference between a crash and a hard landing is that planes make it to the gate safely during a hard landing.
He later relented, admitting the AC624 hard landing was indeed a crash.
“A crash is when an airplane doesn’t make it to the gate, like in this incidence,” he told reporters at the airport Sunday.
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