Plane With 140 People Catches Fire After Crash Landing At Miami Airport

MIAMI, FL — A Red Air flight from the Dominican Republic caught fire after crash landing at the Miami International Airport Tuesday afternoon.

The plane’s landing gear collapsed as the flight arrived from Santo Domingo around 5:30 p.m., the airport tweeted.

As it crash landed, the plane steered off the runway, hitting several objects, including a crane tower, reports said.

The airline, which released a statement on Twitter that was translated from Spanish, said that 130 passengers and 10 crew members were evacuated from the plane.

“At Red Air we express our absolute solidarity with the passengers and the crew of the aircraft,” the airline said.

After assessing passengers for injuries, three were taken to local hospitals for treatment, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue posted on Twitter.

No serious injuries were reported, though, as Mayor Daniella Levine Cava tweeted that the three people treated suffered only minor injuries.

The mayor landed in Miami on a different flight from Philadelphia around the same time as the Red Air crash.

“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,” Levine Cava told WSVN.

Fire rescue responders extinguished the fire and contained fuel spillage at the airport.

One passenger, Paola Garcia, described a harrowing scene to WESH.

"We were bumping like side to side and all the windows, like, break one part of the window. The window couldn't enter in the airplane but everything fine and people start running and running and running,” she said. “And I like jump and I start running because it was like fire and all that, and I thought it was going to explode."

She also told reporters at the airport, “I thought I was going to die.”

Another passenger, Alfredo Machado, told WPBF, “Something sounded like something broke or something gave up and the plane went down on the left side and started spinning and we went to the grass. After that, we saw smoke and flames and we got out of the plane through the emergency exit on the window, on top of the wings, and then from the wing, down.”

The National Transportation Safety Board said that it's sending investigators to look into the plane’s gear collapse at MIA. The team will arrive at the scene Wednesday, the agency tweeted.