Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, the Chairman of Emirates Airline, confirmed that the firefighter lost his life in the rescue operations, Xinhua news agency reported.
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Sheikh Mohammed also serves as the prime minister and vice president of the United Arab Emirates.
One witness said it looked like the Emirates plane “belly landed on the tarmac” when it tried to land at 12.45pm local time. There were 300 people on board the aircraft at the time.
The flight had two Indian crew members on board, he said.
Emirates said it expected an eight-hour network-wide delay in its operations.
The estimated time of departure would be intimated once the flights take off from Dubai, officials said.
The airport is the busiest air hub in the world in terms of worldwide passenger traffic. “They idea is that you have to be able to evacuate an aircraft within 90 seconds if there is an accident on the ground”, said Quest.
On board the flight, there were 20 different nationalities, majority were Indian, with six Americans, two Australians, 24 Britons and 11 people from the United Arab Emirates, BBC reports. There were six people each from the United States and Saudi Arabia, five from Turkey and four from Ireland.
Indian ambassador to the UAE T.P. Seetharam said that Indian diplomats had been dispatched to the airport and directly met passengers, many of whom were in shock.
Passengers on board the plane described hearing a loud noise after a hard landing. Emergency response teams have been activated and all passengers and crew have been safely evacuated., tweeted Dubai state media.
Hundreds of thousands of Kerala residents work in the Gulf countries.
A spokesperson for the airline said: “Emirates can confirm that today, 3rd August 2016, flight EK521 travelling from Trivandrum International Airport in Thiruvananthapuram, India to Dubai has been involved in an accident at Dubai International Airport”.
According to a statement issued by Emirates, “all 275 passengers including crew members are accounted for and safe”.
It raised the number of people onboard the flight to 300, saying there were 282 passengers and 18 crew.
The accident happened as Flight EK521 was arriving from the southern Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram.
Dubai (DXB), now the busiest worldwide airport for global passengers, handles 200,000 passengers a day, while Dubai-based Emirates is the largest airline in the world by available seat kilometers (ASK) – the measure of an airline’s passenger carrying capacity – which multiplies seats available by distance flown.
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The Emirates Airline said that one firefighter was killed while putting out a fire caused by a plane crash-landing earlier on Wednesday.
