A recent emergency landing by an Air Canada plane at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport was due to an engine surge, according to information from Transport Canada (TC).

Flight 476, a routine flight carrying 175 passengers to Ottawa, took off from Pearson on the evening of July 28, but the pilots detected “an engine anomaly” shortly after the takeoff, according to Air Canada spokesperson Peter Fitzpatrick.

“The flight landed normally, with emergency-response vehicles on standby as a precaution and in accordance to standard procedure,” said Fitzpatrick. “The aircraft, a Boeing 767-300ER, was cleared to taxi to the gate under its own power.”

He added that the incident was reported to TC according to procedure. The federal transport ministry “has reviewed the matter and indicated no further action is required.”

In an e-mailed response to COHSN, TC senior media-relations advisor Marie-Anyk Côté described the problem as “a surge in the left engine,” while noting that the aircraft’s return to Pearson had been merely a precautionary measure.

“Although such occurrences are rare, air carriers have procedures in place to manage emergency situations such as an engine surge,” wrote Côté.

“Pilots operating these flights regularly train for these types of occurrences using flight simulators. At no time were the passengers or flight crew at risk.”

No one was injured in the incident, but media reports have stated that witnesses both on and off the plane saw fire coming out of the Boeing’s left engine and heard loud bangs while the plane was in the air. One of the passengers told the Globe and Mail on July 31 that numerous fire trucks had been waiting for the plane when it arrived back at Pearson; the firefighters inspected the plane for about 20 minutes before it proceeded to the gate.

Flight 476 had reportedly been scheduled to proceed to Heathrow Airport in London, England after the Ottawa landing, before the incident. Passengers were reportedly shifted to a different plane afterwards.

New information from the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has revealed that an Air Canada Airbus 320 came dangerously close to colliding with several other aircraft at San Francisco International Airport on July 7.

Flight 759 was arriving at the airport from Toronto at 11:56 Pacific Standard Time that evening, but mistook a taxiway for the runway next to it and would have collided with four other planes awaiting takeoff clearance, had it not changed course. But the arriving plane aborted the landing after other pilots had alerted air-traffic controllers and flashed landing lights.

An update on the NTSB’s investigation of the incident, posted online on Aug. 2, stated that Flight 759 had been only about 18 metres from the ground at one point. The update included security photos of the incident, showing the Airbus preparing to land on the taxiway before initiating a go-around, along with quotations from a pilot in a United Airlines plane that was taxiing in the runway.

“Where’s this guy going?” the United pilot said to a local air-traffic controller during the incident. “He’s on the taxiway.”

“In post-incident interviews, both incident pilots stated that, during their first approach, they believed the lighted runway on their left was 28L and that they were lined up for 28R,” the NTSB wrote, referring to the runway on which the plane had been cleared to land. “They did not recall seeing aircraft on taxiway C, but that something did not look right to them.”

The update also revealed that runway 28L had been shut down due to construction and that its lights had been turned off. “Runway and approach lighting for runway 28R were on and set to default settings.”

Both pilots of the Air Canada plane were experienced pilots, the Board noted. The captain had logged more than 20,000 total flight hours, of which nearly 4,800 had been in Airbus 320s, while the first officer had flown about 10,000 total flight hours.

No cockpit voice-recorder data was available from the Air Canada aircraft, as the data had been overwritten, the NTSB stated.

The update did not provide a probable cause of the incident or an analysis of the information so far. “No conclusions regarding the cause of the incident should be made from this preliminary information,” wrote the NTSB. “NTSB investigations generally take 12 to 18 months to complete.”

The plane did not appear on radar systems used prevent runway collisions, since those systems are not designed to detect planes on taxiways, according to the update.