Miracle escape
All passengers and crew members survived, jumping out of the plane before the fire broke out.
A Canadian Government official said it appeared everyone survived but 14 people suffered minor injuries.
Steve Shaw, a vice-president of the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, said there were 297 passengers and 12 crew aboard the plane. He said the jet overshot the runway by 200 yards and that he believed the fire broke out after the passengers were evacuated.
Air France also announced in Paris that there were no deaths in the crash.
Officials said the plane was an Air France A340 from Paris that was trying to land at Canada's busiest airport just after 4pm (8pm Irish time) when it ran into trouble. There was a storm - with lightning and strong wind gusts - in the area at the time.
A man who identified himself as a survivor, Olivier Dubos, told CTV the lights in the plane went out a minute before the landing. "It was scary, really, really scary," he said.
He said some passengers scrambled onto nearby Highway 401, where cars stopped, picked them up and took them to the airport. Two busloads of passengers were taken to an airport medical centre.
Another passenger, Roel Bramar, told Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: "I saw lightning, maybe the plane had already been hit by lightning that's because just as we landed the lights went off.
"I got the idea the pilot wanted to lower the plane as soon as possible because there was such a rough storm," he said.
A row of emergency vehicles lined up behind the wreck, and a fire truck sprayed the flames with water. A government transportation highway camera recorded the burning plane, and the footage was broadcast live on television in Canada and the US.
A portion of the plane's wing could be seen jutting from the trees as smoke and flames poured from the middle of its broken fuselage. At one point, another huge plume of smoke emerged from the wreckage, but it wasn't clear whether it was from an explosion.
The flaming ruin was next to the four-lane Highway 401, and some cars and trucks stopped on the roadway after the crash.
Corey Marks told CNN he was at the side of the highway when he watched the Air France plane touch down and crash.
"It was around 4 o'clock, it was getting really dark, and all of a sudden lightning was happening, a lot of rain was coming down," Mr Marks said. "This plane ... came in on the runway, hits the runway nice. Everything looked good, sounds good and all of a sudden we heard the engines backing up. He went straight into the valley and cracked in half."
Toronto's Lester B Pearson International Airport handles over 28 million passengers a year. Located 17 miles west of Toronto in the town of Mississauga.
By Dan Collins
IN a strikingly similar crash, on September 5, 1996, an Air France 747-400 crashed near Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Severe turbulence associated with a weather front seriously injured three of the 206 passengers. One of the three passengers later died.
In the course of yesterday's failed landing there was a storm - with lightning and strong wind gusts - in the Toronto airport area at the time.
Thunderstorms create the possibility of wind shear, the sudden, dangerous air currents that can dash an aeroplane to the ground as it takes off or lands.
The last major jumbo jet crash in North America was on November 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 lost part of its tail and plummeted into a New York city neighbourhood, killing 265 people. Safety investigators concluded that the crash was caused by the pilot moving the rudder too aggressively.
Where wind shear is extreme and becomes a safety hazard, pilots are trained to abort the landings, divert to another suitable airport, or exercise emergency landings on safe ground.
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