A terrifying moment was captured on tape by a Toronto-area family as a Continental Airlines flight lost one of its right wheels upon landing at Buffalo International Airport.

The dramatic video of Flight 3268 was taken by a passenger and obtained by the Toronto Sun. It shows the plane en route from Newark arriving in Buffalo on Tuesday night.

As first seen on torontosun.com yesterday, the video shows a tire and a piece of the wheel embly detaching from the landing gear, shortly after touchdown.

The Canadian-made Q400 Bombardier turbo-prop, which has had a recent ociation with technical glitches, was the aircraft that crashed near Buffalo in February of this year, killing 50 people.

However, investigators in that crash are looking at pilot error as the possible cause.

On Tuesday, the Downsview-made plane with 73 passengers and crew was descending over Buffalo just after 6 p.m. when ashes and debris were seen falling from the wheel as it was lowered, passengers said yesterday.

“I was scared and the other passengers looked worried too,” one passenger said. “For a moment I thought the worst in that we may not make it.”

The 37-second video shows smoke and small pieces of material being shot out from a wheel embly before the entire tire flew off, leaving the aircraft with one tire on its right side.

Passengers said they saw flames shooting from the same wheel embly as the plane took off from New Jersey’s Newark airport just after 5 p.m.

“Quite a few passengers saw the flames on takeoff,” one passenger said.

The passenger who contacted the Sun, who didn’t want to be identified, was returning with his family via Buffalo from a wedding .

Porter Airlines’ eight-aircraft fleet is made up entirely of Q400s. In the days after the deadly February crash in Buffalo, Porter CEO Robert Deluce said it wouldn’t impact the Toronto island-based carrier’s order of 10 more Q400s this year.

In Tuesday’s incident, the plane landed safely but had to be towed to the gate.

“This is not a common occurrence,” said Philip Reed, a spokesman for Colgan Airlines, which operates the flight for Continental.

“The pilot was taxiing back when he noticed there was a loss of hydraulic pressure.”

He said the incident was investigated and the plane was repaired and put back into service.

“The passengers were never in any danger,” Reed said. “This sort of thing does happen from time to time.”

Bombardier spokesman John Arnone said the tire was recently replaced by the airline.

“I am not aware of this ever happening before,” Arnone said yesterday. “This is a very robust and reliable aircraft.”

He said his firm began building the Q400s in 2000 and there are more than 200 in service worldwide. The planes have racked up more than a million “incident-free” hours of flight with more than a million takeoff and landings, he said.

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OTHER INCIDENTS INVOLVING Q400

Incidents involving the Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 Turboprop:

- Sept. 9, 2007: 11 people are hospitalized, five with minor injuries after Scandinavian Airlines Flight 1209 from Copenhagen to Aalborg suffers a collapse of its right landing gear. The aircraft skids off the runway and the engine catches fire.

- Sept. 12, 2007: Scandinavian Airlines Flight 2748 from Copenhagen to Palanga, Lithuania, also suffers a landing gear malfunction. The airline grounds its 33 Dash 8 Q400s. Within hours, Bombardier says all Q400s with more than 10,000 flights should be grounded until further notice.

- Oct. 27, 2007: Scandinavian Airlines Flight 2867 from Bergen to Copenhagen skids off the runway in a controlled emergency landing when the right landing gear fails to deploy.

- Feb. 12, 2009: operated by Colgan Air, from Newark to Buffalo crashes into a house in Clarence Center, a suburb of Buffalo. Fifty people killed.

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