In the moments after Sunday’s deadly LaGuardia plane crash that killed two Air Canada pilots, the passengers onboard Flight 8646, some bleeding and badly injured, worked together to ensure everyone made it off of the plane and onto the tarmac safely.

Some of those passengers have since recounted the harrowing experience, among them, passenger Rebecca Liquori, who was seated in one of the plane’s exit rows.

After the plane collided with a fire truck that was crossing Runway 4 at LaGuardia airport, passengers were confused and screaming in panic, Liquori, a registered nurse, has since told media outlets.

“We didn’t know what was going on, if the plane was going to combust,” she said. “Everybody was scared. Everybody thought they were going to die.”

Fellow passenger Jack Cabot, a 22-year-old student at Ithaca College in New York, told media outlets that many of the plane’s 72 passengers were bleeding because their heads slammed into the seats in front of them during the moment of impact. ”When we hit the truck, everybody kind of lurched forward,” he said. “Immediately to my right, this guy’s blood is coming right out of his nose, and he’s got a black eye.”

Another passenger nearby had a large cut down the center of his forehead, and blood was streaming down his glasses, Cabot recalled.

Liquori’s nurse instincts however, quickly kicked in. Though she was sore from the collision herself, Liquori jumped into action opening the emergency exit next to her in row 19 in order to help passengers off the plane as quickly as possible.

“As a nurse, I know that in emergency situations, it’s kind of best to move with haste,” she recounted.

 

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Passengers quickly headed out of the exit, jumping onto the plane’s wing and then further down onto the airport tarmac below. By Liquori’s estimate, she was off plane in a matter of just three or four minutes. She says passengers readily helped each other to slide down the plane’s wing in order to get out.

Cabot recalled a similar scene of chaos and then the group of passengers banding together. “There was this sudden overwhelming panic because we had hit something and nobody was in control. There were no pilots still around and it just felt like plane was taking a course and it was really in somebody else’s hands whether we lived or died,” Cabot told CBC News during an interview about the crash.

The Ithaca College student said the plane continued rolling forward quickly in the moments right after the initial collision with the firetruck. “It continued to be this terrifying moment where we didn’t know if we were going to make it,” Cabot said.

Once the badly damaged plane came to a stop, the plane’s passengers, all 72 of whom survived, then began to worry “What do we do next?” said Cabot.

That’s when passengers sitting next to the plane’s various emergency exits “took charge,” as Cabot recounted during his CBC interview. “They got the emergency door open and got everyone out, and helped everyone jump off onto wing of plane and then onto the ground.”

“We all coalesced [on the tarmac] in the rain before the airport staff arrived and we all just had this real moment of grappling [thinking about] ‘Oh wow we just survived this.’ and ‘Wow this is much worse than we thought,’” Cabot said.

Like Liquori, Cabot recounted how the group of passengers onboard that fateful flight truly helped each other in order to get through the frightening incident. “Somebody just took charge and got the door open…We were all just trying to get through this one together,” he told CBC. “Some people took charge and it was really helpful…Everyone was able to walk off [the plane.]”

For her part, Liquori said she was “just happy to be alive,” adding that she “would have never pictured a one-hour flight that I’ve done countless times … ending like this.”

In addition to killing the two pilots, the incident, which happened at around 11:40 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, injured 41 passengers who were taken to hospital, some with serious injuries. The pilots who died in the tragic crash have been confirmed as Québec native Antoine Forest, 30, and Mackenzie Gunther, a graduate of Toronto’s Seneca Polytechnic.

At a news conference Monday afternoon, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani praised the passengers for the way they responded to the incident and the help they provided each other. “I also want to commend those who were thrust into a frightening accident and reacted not only with composure, but by extending a hand to the person next to them, passengers who opened the emergency door and helped one another off the plane, people who kept one another calm,” he said.