A survivor of the deadly Air Canada crash shared her harrowing experience with MS NOW’s Ana Cabrera, describing the moment the passenger jet collided with a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport in New York City on Sunday.
Rebecca Liquori, a nurse from New York’s Nassau County, told Cabrera on Tuesday that passengers aboard the jet were already on “high alert” before the landing, since the plane was experiencing extreme turbulence.
Seconds after the plane hit the ground and found itself in the direct path of the fire truck, Liquori said she could hear “the grinding noise of the brake,” as the pilots attempted to “slow down the plane to prevent this collision.“
“After the brake, you just heard a very loud boom, and we just all got thrown out of our seats and propelled back into the back of the seat,” she recounted. “There was just a couple of seconds of eerie silence, because we all thought that we were going to die.”
Liquori said passengers were “in a panic” after the plane came to a halt, unaware that the pilot and co-pilot had been killed in the collision and a flight attendant had been thrown from the plane.
“I was sitting in the emergency exit row right next to the emergency exit door, and I was waiting on guidance from the flight crew, not realizing that what had happened to the pilots at that time, not realizing that the flight attendant had been ejected,” she told MS NOW. “I opened the emergency exit, and the woman sitting next to me, her name was Rachel, she helped me, and we were able to just get the emergency exit door out of the way, and passengers got out.”
While Liquori wasn’t harmed in the crash, the nurse described some of the injuries she witnessed among her fellow passengers. “I saw people, you know, gashes in their head, people bleeding from their head, people needing stitches, people having black eyes from just hitting their face against the front of the seat that was ahead of them,” she said. “People looked like they just had gotten out of a boxing match, with the swelling under the eye and the black and blues.” In the aftermath of the collision, Liquori told Cabrera that she couldn’t “grasp the concept that I just survived this” and said the pilots “saved” her and her fellow passengers’ lives. “At the time, I didn’t know that they had passed away, but I was just thinking, ‘I can’t believe this has happened. This is surreal.’ I couldn’t wrap my mind around it — what I was seeing and what I had experienced — and being able to just take a moment to realize that it could have all been over for me.” Days later, Liquori said she’s still dealing with the trauma of Sunday’s disaster. “I’m just trying to take everything one day at a time,” she said. “Yesterday I did not sleep after the crash. Every time I closed my eyes, I could hear the boom, the screams, my screams, you know, the panic that set in.” You can watch Liquori’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
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