Even though it took around two hours for passengers to get off the plane, the most important events happened during those 12 seconds, a survivor of the LaGuardia incident revealed  

Inside that shattered cabin, terror and tenderness lived side by side. Jack Cabot remembers the bang, the darkness, the blood on the face of the stranger beside him — and then, just as clearly, the way people began to move for each other. Passengers formed a line at the exit, shared coats, wiped blood with spare masks, and made space for the most injured. A British woman refused to leave a terrified little girl traveling alone. No one had training. They had each other.Outside, the cost became impossible to ignore. Two pilots — including captain Antoine Forest, who once posted a photo from the sky asking, “Why I want to be a pilot?” — were gone. Survivors now talk about them as heroes who “saved everybody on that plane,” guiding it through those final, impossible seconds. Forest’s old image of a wing over autumn earth has become an accidental memorial, a glimpse of a man who loved the sky long before his name was in the news. Between the cockpit sacrifice and the quiet bravery in the cabin, this tragedy is no longer just a crash report. It is a story of people who were terrified, who “messed up,” who tried, who failed, and who still reached for one another in the dark.