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.”








