Wild footage shows passengers flee ‘miracle’ Miami plane crash

This is the moment nearly all passengers walked away without a scratch, after a plane crash-landed at Miami International Airport.

Dramatic video footage showed passengers fleeing a burning plane after landing gear collapsed on a Miami runway.

“The firefighters made a miracle happen, they arrived within a minute,” said Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

“Apparently a tire burst, and then it went back up and came back down, and the landing was so hard that the entire landing apparatus was destroyed and the belly of the plane is on the ground,” she added.

Three people were hospitalised with minor injuries but the rest remained largely unscathed after RED Air Flight 203 from the Dominican Republic slid along the runway at Miami International Airport.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the US government agency in charge of probing civil aviation accidents, is investigating.

Images and footage of the accident went viral after the accident on Tuesday evening local time.

The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 aircraft lay charred and mangled with a crushed nose as acrid black smoke billowed from the fuselage.

The budget airline, which launched in November last year, took off from Santo Domingo airport before experiencing “technical difficulties.”

“RED Air #203 from Santo Domingo had its landing gear in the nose of the plane collapse, which seems to have caused a fire,” said a statement on the Miami International Airport’s Twitter account.

While Red Air said there were 130 passengers and 10 crew on board, a Miami airport spokesman said there was “a total of 126”, without giving a reason for the discrepancy.

“Commissions of the Dominican Institute of Civil Aeronautics, together with the local authorities in the city of Miami, have initiated the pertinent investigations in order to determine the circumstances of the event,” the airline said in a statement.

“At RED Air we express our absolute solidarity with the passengers and crew of the aircraft.”

RED Air mechanic Hector Dejesus, a former Dominican military aviation mechanic, said he was “in shock” after the narrow escape.

“I suppose it was a hard landing. We do maintenance all the time. I suppose it was that,” he told the Miami Herald. “I’m in shock. I would see things like this in the air force.”

Passenger Mauricio Davis, who was returning from Venezuela on a connecting flight in Santo Domingo, told the outlet that those on-board were “very frightened”.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue extinguish a Red Air jet after it caught fire while landing at Miami International Airport. Picture: Supplied

“People were grabbing the seats to keep from spinning around,” he said, adding that when everyone realised there was fire all began screaming with panic.

Paola Garcia thought she was “going to die”, according to CBS News.

“There was an old man next to me and I was hugging him. It was horrible.”

“We were bumping from side to side and all the windows like break and then everything’s fine,” she said. “Then the people start running and running and I like jump and start running because there was fire and all that.”

Yamil Elneser described the hard crash landing before passengers slid down to the tarmac to board buses to the main terminal.

Passengers walk away from the burning plane. Picture: Supplied

“The wheel of the left side it blow away and we felt like the aeroplane go to the left side and it started shaking very, very hard and then the aeroplane went off the runway and we saw the flame,” Elneser said.

Paolo Delgado shared cellphone footage of the evacuation with CBS Austin, showing passengers frantically trying to flee the burning airliner.

“Panic, almost panic. it was a terrible experience, actually, but like I said I feel safe. It happened like one minute and then you could see all the officers through the window doing their jobs.”

Originally published as Wild footage shows passengers flee ‘miracle’ Miami plane crash