Survivors of the fearsome plane crash at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Monday afternoon — which, thankfully, includes everyone who was aboard the aircraft as there were no fatalities — said their plane flipped over without warning just seconds after its wheels touched the tarmac.
Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 from Minneapolis to Toronto completed what its passengers described as a routine descent before it suddenly flipped upside down, losing a wing and its tail fin in a fiery crash.
“One minute you’re landing, kind of waiting to see your friends and your people. And the next minute, you’re physically upside-down and just really turned around. It was cement and metal,” said one of the passengers, paramedic Pete Carlson.
“Everyone on that plane suddenly became very close in terms of how to help one another, how to console one another, and that was powerful,” Carlson said.
Another passenger, Colorado professional skier Pete Koukov, said he “unbuckled pretty fast and kind of lowered myself to the floor, which was the ceiling.”
“People were panicking,” he recalled.
Carlson and Koukov said much of the panic came from noticing the flaming debris strewn beside the plane, which prompted fears of a fire or explosion.
Koukov later told Fox News there was “no warning from the pilot” that anything might be amiss.
“There was no physical warning either — I didn’t feel like anything was wrong until the second the wheels touched the ground and it kind of went all mayhem from there. We hit the ground and kind of bounced up and turned on our side. We were sliding on our side for a while,” he said.
Koukov said the passengers ended up “hanging upside down like bats,” a bizarre situation documented by several of the passengers with their cell phones:
Miraculously, no one was killed in the incident, although 21 of the 80 people aboard were hospitalized with injuries, one of them a child. Only two of the injured remained in the hospital as of Tuesday morning.
Paramedics said most of the injuries consisted of back sprains, head injuries, anxiety, and nausea from the fuel that was spilled during the crash. Several of the injuries were critical in nature, but none were described as life-threatening, in part thanks to a swift response from emergency crews at Pearson airport.
Pearson Airport CEO Deborah Flint said Toronto saw “extreme conditions” from two separate snowstorms on Thursday and Sunday, accumulating over 20 inches of snow — more than the region usually gets in an entire winter. She said she would not comment on runway conditions at the time of the crash until a “full and complete investigation” is completed.
The Meteorological Service of Canada reported blowing show and winds gusting to 40 miles per hour at the time of the crash on Monday afternoon, which is a strong but not severe wind velocity for landing a sizable jet plane. Some pilots who reviewed the crash video have said the rear landing gear appeared to have been torn off the plane, which might have been caused by a strong lateral wind gust combined with a slick runway.
The New York Times on Tuesday cited a video, recorded from another runway at Pearson, which “shows the aircraft landing hard on a snow-covered runway and then flipping over on its right side amid black clouds of smoke.”
The plane involved in the crash was a Bombardier CRJ-900, an older but still popular model. According to Mitsubishi, which bought the CRJ series of planes from Bombardier and then discontinued them, over 400 CRJ-900s are currently operated by 18 airlines around the world.
The UK Daily Mail on Tuesday quoted aviation safety experts who said CRJ-900 planes have been involved in 118 safety incidents since 2005, but most of them were minor. The CRJ-900, which was built in Canada, has never been involved in a fatal accident.
“The most serious incidents with the plane appear to be related to landing, though the aircraft has never ended upside-down as it did during Monday’s crash-landing in Toronto,” the Daily Mail reported.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday that Canada’s Transportation Safety Board would lead the investigation into the crash, with assistance from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
Although the wing coming off the plane is among the most frightening details of the crash, aviation safety experts said breakaway wings are designed to keep fuel away from passengers during a crash, so losing the wing might have been one reason no one was killed.
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