A flight attendant is lucky to be alive after surviving being thrown more than 400 feet. She was ejected when a plane crashed into a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday.
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An Air Canada flight crashed into the emergency vehicle over the weekend. Dozens were injured and two died in the crash. Meanwhile, flight attendant Solange Tremblay went for another flight herself. The flight attendant was in a jump seat, designed to withstand crashes.
Upon impact, Tremblay was ejected 300 feet away. Fortunately, she survived with just a fractured legs. Things could have been worse. Jeff Guzzetti, a former federal crash investigator, credited the jump seat with saving the flight attendant's life.
"The flight attendant's seat is kind of a jump seat that folds down and is bolted to the wall, the same wall that the cockpit utilizes," said Guzzetti. "It's a very robust seat. It's designed to withstand probably more crash loads than passenger seats because you need the flight attendant to help passengers get out of an airplane after a crash."
Flight Attendant Ejected into the Air
Meanwhile, the daughter of the flight attendant, Sarah Lepine, was thankful that her mother survived the crash. She called it a miracle.
"I'm still trying to understand how all this happened," Lepine said, "but she definitely has a guardian angel watching over her. At the moment of impact, her seat was ejected more than 100 meters (328 feet) from the plane. They found her and she was still strapped into her seat."
Sadly, the pilot, Antoine Forest, and copilot, Mackenzie Gunther, died when the plane crashed into the fire truck. At least 41 people had to go to the hospital for injuries. Air traffic control had cleared the firetruck to cross the runway when the accident occurred.
The National Transit Safety Board is investigating the situation. National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy said there were multiple failures.
"We have found in all of our investigations that it is not a single error that led to a terrible tragedy," Homendy told Fox News.
