Flights resume at Halifax airport after plane slides off tarmac

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is investigating after an Air Canada flight from Toronto slid off the tarmac after landing in Halifax Monday evening.

Flight AC614, a Boeing 767 plane, touched down in Halifax at 6:30 p.m. According to a passenger, the plane landed normally but it slid off the tarmac as it was making a turn toward the gate.

“They were about to make that turn that you turn off onto the sort of taxiing runway … that takes you back towards the … terminal and on that turn is when it skidded,” said Andrew Leitao, who is an employee of CBC Nova Scotia.

Lilly Burgoyne, another passenger on the plane, said it felt like “a rumble strip on the highway.”

Burgoyne said everyone on the flight was calm and that the pilot was “really cool about it.” She said it felt like only one wheel went off the tarmac.

According to the airport authority, the plane was not able to make it to the gate on its own.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said it has deployed a team of investigators to the airport. By Tuesday morning the plane had been been put in a hangar for a maintenance inspection, according to Isabelle Arthur, a spokesperson for Air Canada.

Arthur expects the plane to be back in service soon.

The airport temporarily shut down its runways after Monday’s incident, but resumed flights shortly after 9 p.m. that evening.

Both arriving and departing flights were temporarily suspended.

Buygoyne was one of the first passengers to take a bus from the plane to the main airport building around 9:15 p.m.

Air Canada told CBC News there were 211 passengers on the plane and none of them were injured.

The airline says the plane was unable to taxi passengers to the gate because of poor weather conditions at the airport.

“Our priority is to safely get our passengers to the terminal as soon as possible,” said Arthur in an email.