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Miami-Dade County mayor Daniella Levine Cava was briefed by fire and rescue services personnel after she arrived at the scene of the 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,” Ms Cava told media as she confirmed that three people were injured in the crash.

Twitter user @findmory posted a video of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue response to the crashlanding of the Red Air flight from the Dominican Republic as his own flight taxied past the wreckage.

A great deal of damage can be seen to the nose of the aircraft from where it impacted the runway after the landing gear collapsed.

On Tuesday at approximately 6pm, a McDonnell Douglas MD-80 that had taken off from the Dominican Republic, the home base for the recently founded airlines RED Air, caught fire when its landing gear collapsed on the runway at Miami International Airport.

The McDonnell Douglas MD-80 is a mid-size, medium-range jet airliner and is manufactured by McDonnell Douglas. Since taking off in 1979, it has been used by dozens of airlines from around the world, with major customers including Delta Air Lines, Spirit Airlines, American Airlines, Alaska Airlines and Swissair.

American Airlines was the first major US carrier to use the airliner and began by leasing 20 of the 142-seat aircraft from McDonnell Douglas in 1982. In the early 2000s, the airline announced that it would retire all of its MD-80s and replace them with the more fuel efficient Boeing 737-800s. The final American Airlines MD-80 flight flew on 4 September 2019.

As of May 2022, there were 148 MD-80 series aircrafts in service, with operators including USA Jet Airlines, who has a total of 18 of the airliners, and Canadian Airways Congo, who has two of the jets in service, among a number of other carriers with smaller fleets.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, the database has documented 88 occurences of accidents involving the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 since 1979, with 1,446 fatalities.

A 36-year-old mechanic from RED Air interviewed by the Miami Herald provided his first impressions about the landing of the plane on Tuesday night, which he describes as being a “hard landing”.

Hector Dejesus, employed by the airline and a former Dominican military aviation mechanic, first told a reporter from the Florida-based outlet that he thought perhaps there was a pilot error in the landing.

“I suppose it was a hard landing. We do maintenance all the time. I suppose it was that,” he told the Miami Herald. “I’m in shock. I would see things like this in the air force.”

An investigation into the crash is being handled by the National Transportation Safety Board, who told reporters they’d be sending a team of investigators to the incident site on Wednesday.

A passenger who was onboard RED Air Flight 203 when it crashed at the Miami International Airport described a “frightening” scene to local news outlet the Miami Herald.

“People were very frightened,” said Mauricio Davis, who was returning from Venezuela and grabbed a connecting flight in Santo Domingo to Miami.

“People were grabbing the seats to keep from spinning around,” he added, noting that when the 126 passengers travelling onboard realised there was fire, they collectively began screaming with panic.

Read more from the Miami Herald here.

One of the passengers travelling on board Red Air Flight 203 from Santo Domingo to Miami on Tuesday afternoon filmed the terrifying moments before he and other passengers made an emergency exit down the plane’s evacuation slide.

Paolo Delgado, who shared his cellphone footage with CBS Austin’s John-Carlos Estrada, can be seen fleeing the grounded plane while passengers ahead and behind him are heard hurriedly trying to get off the smoking airliner.

As Mr Delgado descends the emergency slide, a plume of black smoke can be seen wafting from the plane that he has just seconds ago escaped from.

The footage shows some passengers had stopped to collect luggage including wheeled suitcases before exiting the aircraft, against rules about evacuating in an emergency.

Watch the full clip below:

Abe Asher takes a look at the newcomer airline to the region’s aviation sector.

Red Air released the following statement after Tuesday’s crash.

Passengers screamed and fled from the scene of a flaming plane crash at the Miami International Airport, video shows.

Just before 5.40pm on Tuesday, a Red Air flight arriving from the Dominican Republic had a landing gear failure upon arrival, sending a jet with 126 people sliding across runway nine at MIA.

The craft quickly caught fire, sending passengers running from the grounded jet, which was inbound from Santo Domingo.Some were filmed hustling away from the wreck, while others stopped to film the crash with their phones.

Many were seen hauling away luggage from the burning plane as emergency crews arrived.

Josh Marcus reports the details: