Halifax Plunged Into Darkness As Air Canada Jet Slams Short Of Runway

There are nights when everything feels wrong before it even begins. On March 29, 2015, Halifax was wrapped in cold and darkness, and while most people were asleep in their warm homes, 138 souls aboard Air Canada Flight 624 were approaching a runway they would never reach. 

It was a routine flight on paper—an Airbus A320 making a short hop from Toronto to Halifax. But from the moment that aircraft left the ground, the universe seemed to be conspiring against it.

What unfolded would expose systemic flaws in airline procedure, airport infrastructure failures, psychological traps in cockpit decision-making, and an eerie blindness to danger until the very last second.

The aircraft itself was a veteran of the skies, almost 24 years old, but still trusted by Air Canada and flown by experienced hands.

The captain had logged nearly 12,000 hours, half of those on the Airbus A320, and the first officer brought 11,000 of his own, with 6,000 in the same aircraft. It was their first time flying together, which should have raised caution but didn’t.

The captain had a history of sleep apnea, which didn’t seem to factor in tonight, but the evening flight schedule and environmental stressors would prove to be an invisible companion in the cockpit.

With the final leg of their shift approaching, the two men in the cockpit were about to find out just how little margin for error winter aviation allows.

The weather over Halifax was cruel—snow, wind gusts, and temperatures falling below freezing. While technically still within operating limits, the stormy skies above the small Canadian city should have triggered alarms. The airport itself was woefully under-equipped for the conditions.

Runway 05, the only one in use that night, was illuminated by a decades-old lighting system, with just five widely spaced approach lights. Worse still, a configuration error meant that increasing the runway lighting brightness to setting 4 automatically dimmed the approach lights to setting 2—a nearly invisible hazard.

PAPI lights, a crucial system for visual guidance, had been operating at reduced power all day. Yet no one told the flight crew. Crucial visibility reports fluctuated wildly, from 1600 to 4000 feet, but the information never made it to the cockpit. In a profession where seconds and feet decide life and death, this silence was damning.

Meanwhile, inside Flight 624, things appeared calm. The cabin crew was reduced to three instead of the standard four due to a recent change in regulation.

Air Canada had adopted the 1:50 ratio of flight attendants to passengers allowed in the U.S. and Europe, even though their own staff hadn’t been trained yet on how to manage multiple emergency exits.

As the snow fell harder over Halifax, the passengers, some in shorts and sandals, remained blissfully unaware that they were about to become part of a near-catastrophe.

They couldn’t see what the pilots saw—ice forming on instruments, static from snow hitting the windshield, and altimeters playing dangerous games in the cold air.

The pilots did what they could. They recalculated descent altitudes to adjust for the cold, knowing that cold temperatures trick the altimeter into reading higher than the aircraft's actual position.

These calculations mattered. Missing them by even a hundred feet could mean descending straight into terrain. And that is almost exactly what happened.

The descent into Halifax began with the crew holding over a waypoint called SETI, trying to buy time for the weather to improve. With fuel still available, it wasn’t a reckless decision.

But it planted the seeds of what safety experts call “plan continuation bias”—a psychological trap where pilots become so fixated on completing the mission that they ignore changing circumstances.

At 12:13 a.m., air traffic control reported an improvement in visibility to half a mile. The flight crew, likely desperate to conclude their shift and land, took the green light and began their approach.

By this time, the captain had recalculated descent angles to 3.5 degrees from the published 3.08 to compensate for the cold, with a minimum descent altitude set at 883 feet.

But the timing was off. Just 0.2 nautical miles too early, they began descending before reaching the final approach fix. In normal weather, this might have been survivable.

But on this night, with failing visual references, misleading altimeter readings, and a dangerously dim approach lighting system, it was the beginning of the end.

They flew blind into the void. Snowflakes acted like millions of little white lies, distorting depth perception and hiding the runway's true position.

Winds nudged the plane ever so slightly off the intended path, and the aircraft's faithful autopilot maintained its 3.5-degree descent angle, unaware it was guiding the plane not to a runway but to disaster. At 400 feet, the radio altimeter’s mechanical voice called out its warning.

The crew should have initiated a go-around. But they didn’t. The captain, believing he had visual contact with the approach lights, declared the plane was landing. They had already passed below their minimum safe altitude. Moments later, with just seconds left, the first officer finally cried, “Pull up!” But it was too late.

The aircraft struck power lines just short of the runway threshold. Halifax Airport was plunged into darkness. With terrifying force, the Airbus slammed into a snow-covered embankment, then tore through the airport's localizer antenna array, briefly bounced into the air, and crashed again.

The landing gear shattered, slicing through the aircraft’s stabilizers. A cargo beam punched through the floor. A coffee maker flew loose, injuring a flight attendant.

In the cockpit, both pilots were flung from their seats—the captain's head struck the glare shield, and the first officer sustained serious eye injuries.

The PA system was dead. The lights were gone. It was up to the passengers to evacuate themselves, in the snow, in the dark, and in clothes meant for a different season.

Remarkably, no one died. One person was seriously injured, 24 suffered minor injuries, and 113 people walked away unharmed. But the fact that everyone survived doesn’t make this a success. It is a miracle—one born out of circumstance, not preparedness.

The pilots, following company procedures that contradicted both Airbus and Canadian aviation guidelines, never once verified their distance from the runway after the final fix. They trusted their instruments and company training too much. The lighting system at Halifax failed them.

Transport Canada failed them. And perhaps most damning of all, their trust in automation prevented them from taking control when it mattered most.

The aftermath was predictably bureaucratic. Air Canada adjusted its procedures. Halifax upgraded its runway lighting. NAV Canada issued new directives. The industry promised to learn its lessons. But the real lesson is not in the policies or manuals. It’s in the voices that were never heard.

The voice of the snowstorm screaming through the windshield. The voice of the altimeter warning “Too low.” The voice of a first officer saying, too late, “Pull up.” In those final seconds, the silence of a thousand misjudgments screamed louder than any alarm.