A Delta Air Lines jet flipped on its roof while landing on Monday at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, but all 80 people on board survived and those hurt had relatively minor injuries, the airport’s chief executive said.
Snow blown by winds gusting to 65kph swirled when the flight from Minneapolis carrying 76 passengers and four crew attempted to land at about 2:15pm. Communications between the tower and pilot were normal on approach and it was not clear what went so drastically wrong when the plane touched down.
Peter Carlson, a passenger traveling to Toronto for a paramedics conference, said the landing was “very forceful.”
Photo: AFP
“All of a sudden everything just kind of went sideways and then next thing I know it’s kind of a blink and I’m upside down still strapped in,” he told CBC News.
Carlson said when he took off his seat belt he crashed onto the ceiling, which had become the floor. He smelled gas, saw aviation fuel cascading down the cabin windows and knew he needed to get out but said his fatherly intuition and paramedic skills kicked in. He looked for those he could help.
Carlson and another man assisted a mother and her young son out of the plane and then Carlson dropped onto the tarmac.
Snow was blowing and it “felt like I was stepping onto tundra,” he said.
“I didn’t care how cold it was, didn’t care how far I had to walk, how long I had to stand — all of us just wanted to be out of the aircraft,” he said.
Canadian authorities held two brief news conferences, but provided no details on the crash. Video posted to social media showed the aftermath, with the Mitsubishi CRJ-900LR overturned, the fuselage seemingly intact and firefighters dousing what was left of the fire, as passengers climbed out and walked across the tarmac.
“We are very grateful there was no loss of life and relatively minor injuries,” Greater Toronto Airports Authority CEO executive Deborah Flint told reporters.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a statement that “the hearts of the entire global Delta family are with those affected.”
Toronto Pearson Fire Chief Todd Aitken said 18 passengers were taken to the hospital. Earlier in the day, Ornge air ambulance said it was transporting one pediatric patient to Toronto’s SickKids hospital and two injured adults to other hospitals in the city.
Emergency personnel reached the plane within a few minutes and Aitken said the response “went as planned.”
“The runway was dry and there was no cross-wind conditions,” he added.
The crash was the fourth major aviation accident in North America in the past three weeks. A commercial plane and a US Army helicopter collided near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington on Jan. 29, killing 67 people. A medical transportation plane crashed in Philadelphia on Jan. 31, killing the six people on board and another person on the ground; and on Feb. 6, 10 people were killed in a plane crash in Alaska.
The last major crash at Pearson was on Aug. 2, 2005, when an Airbus A340 landing from Paris skidded off the runway and burst into flames amid stormy weather. All 309 passengers and crew aboard survived the crash.
John Cox, CEO of aviation safety consulting firm Safety Operating Systems, said the CRJ-900 is a proven aircraft that has been in service for decades and does a good job of handling inclement weather.
Cox, who flew for US Air for 25 years and has worked on US National Transportation Safety Board investigations, said it was unusual for a plane to end up on its roof.
“We’ve seen a couple of cases of takeoffs where airplanes have ended up inverted, but it’s pretty rare,” he said.
Among the questions that need to be answered is why the crashed plane was missing its right wing, he said.
“If one wing is missing, it’s going to have a tendency to roll over,” he said. “Those are going to be central questions as to what happened to the wing and the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. They will be found, if not today, tomorrow, and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada will read them out and they will have a very good understanding of what actually occurred here.”
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