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.
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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