PASSENGER DESCRIBES TORONTO PLANE CRASH

(CNN) — A Delta Air Lines flight from Minneapolis crashed, turned upside down and caught fire on the runway at Toronto Pearson International Airport while attempting to land Monday, the latest in a string of passenger plane crashes since December.

Video obtained by CNN shows the rear landing gear of the jet buckling and the right wing shearing away in a fireball after the plane landed hard on the runway.

All 80 people on board the CRJ900 twin-jet aircraft survived, but 21 people were taken to hospitals with injuries, Delta said in a statement. By Thursday morning the final passenger that remained hospitalized was released, according to Delta.

The plane briefly skids on its belly before rolling over, sending smoke and powdery snow shooting into the air.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” says the person taking the video, watching from inside a different plane near the runway.

“When we hit, it was just super hard. It hit the ground, and the plane went sideways,” said passenger John Nelson, adding, “It’s amazing that we’re still here.”

“Even now I smell like jet fuel,” Nelson told CNN on Monday night.

By Tuesday afternoon, the plane wreckage was barely recognizable, camouflaged against the ground by snow plastered across the frozen fuselage, its left wing crumpled and right wing missing. Removal of the wreckage was completed Wednesday evening, Delta said.

Monday’s crash is the latest incident in a deadly year for air travel in North America. Earlier this month, 10 people were killed when a regional airline plane crashed in Alaska.

Less than three weeks ago, 67 were killed when an American Airlines plane collided midair with a US Army Black Hawk helicopter near Washington, DC. Two days later, a medevac jet crashed in Philadelphia, killing all six on board and one person on the ground.

Those disasters were preceded by deadly crashes in December in South Korea and Kazakhstan.

Here’s what we know:

All 80 passengers and crew survived

Delta Flight 4819, operated by Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air, departed from Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport and crashed at the airport, located mostly in the suburb of Mississauga, west of Toronto, around 2:15 p.m. ET Monday, Delta said in a statement.

“The hearts of the entire global Delta family are with those affected by today’s incident at Toronto-Pearson International Airport,” said Delta CEO Ed Bastian. “I want to express my thanks to the many Delta and Endeavor team members and the first responders on site.”

“I’m incredibly proud of the professionalism of the Endeavor crew members who evacuated the aircraft, as well as the first responders at Toronto Pearson International Airport and the airport leadership team,” Bastian added in a memo to Delta employees obtained by CNN Tuesday.

Deborah Flint, the president and CEO of Toronto Pearson International Airport, also credited the “textbook response” of first responders for helping prevent loss of life.

Delta is offering $30,000 to the passengers involved in the flight, an airline spokesperson told CNN on Wednesday.

“Delta Care Team representatives are telling customers this gesture has no strings attached and does not affect rights,” said Morgan Durrant, a spokesperson for the airline. If all 76 passengers involved took the money, it would add up to a little over $2.2 million.

The airline is continuing to work on identifying and sorting through passengers’ bags removed from the wreckage. In some cases, where potentially harmful fluids are being cleaned from belongings, the process could take weeks, Delta said.

Hard landing left passengers ‘upside down hanging like bats’

Pete Koukov, a passenger on the plane, said he “didn’t know anything was the matter” until they were on the ground.

“We hit the ground, and we were sideways, and then we were upside down hanging like bats,” Koukov told CNN’s Brianna Keilar.

Nick Costigan, who spoke with the Toronto Star, said his “whole window just turned into flame briefly and then it was dark as we slid.” It was “weirdly” quiet once the plane stopped, he told the outlet.

“I took my seat belt off, which I’d obviously left fastened for the landing, and as I took it off, crashed down on to the ceiling which had become the floor,” Pete Carlson, another passenger who is an executive with a Minneapolis health care company, told CNN newsgathering partner CBC.

Paramedics who responded to the crash treated multiple types of injuries, including back sprains, head lacerations and nausea due to jet fuel fumes, said Cory Tkatch with Peel Regional Paramedic Services.

Video of the crash does not appear to show the usual “flare” of the jet, where the pilot pulls the nose up just before landing, exposing the wings to more air resistance.

“There was no attempt to flare at all, which slows the plane down,” said CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general of the Department of Transportation.

Koukov said he was able to unbuckle his seat belt, get himself down to the ground and then walk out of the plane, but some others needed help getting down from their seats.

“Just feeling lucky and happy I got to give the person I didn’t know sitting next to me a big hug, that we were OK, and see my friends who are here to pick me up from the airport and give them a big hug,” he said.

Why did the plane overturn?

As of Tuesday afternoon, “It’s far too early to say what the cause of this accident might be,” said Ken Webster, a senior investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.

The crash Monday happened on a gusty day following heavy snowfall.

“On Thursday and Sunday, we got more than 20 inches of accumulated snow,” Flint said Tuesday. That’s more snowfall than the area received all of the previous winter.

“What we can say is the runway was dry, and there was no crosswind conditions,” said Todd Aitken, the airport fire chief, Monday evening.

However, an air traffic controller told the Delta pilot there were winds of 26 mph, gusting up to 38 mph, blowing across the plane’s path at a 40-degree angle, according to a recording of airport tower radio traffic. The wind at Pearson was reportedly blowing snow into the air with a visibility of 5 miles.

Aitken, in a Tuesday briefing, declined to speak more on the weather conditions, deferring further questions due to the ongoing investigation.

The weather conditions may have become treacherous before the pilots were able to adapt, said retired jet pilot Les Abend.

“With blowing snow, it may have changed rapidly, so the airplane that landed ahead of this aircraft may have had a different condition than this particular Delta regional jet,” Abend told CNN’s Kayla Tausche on Tuesday.

The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder were recovered from the plane, Webster said. The recorders were sent to their lab “for further analysis,” he added, but didn’t say in what condition they were found.

Videos of the crash could explain why the aircraft overturned after landing, according to Steven Wallace, former director of the FAA’s Office of Crash Investigation.

“You see the right wing fails, but the airplane is still going quite fast, and that left wing is generating a tremendous amount of lift,” Wallace told CNN’s Pamela Brown. “So that immediately causes the airplane to roll inverted. That’s quite clear.”

The runway where the plane crashed is expected to remain closed through at least Thursday evening, according to a notice issued to pilots Tuesday.

“We do expect that the investigators on-site will be reviewing the aircraft on its current configuration on the runway for the next 48 hours,” Flint said Tuesday. Over 20 investigators are on the ground as of Tuesday afternoon, Webster said.

The last major aviation accident at the Toronto airport was nearly two decades ago, on August 2, 2005, according to The Associated Press, when an inbound Air France flight from Paris slid off the runway and burst into flames. All 309 people on board survived.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is leading the investigation with help from the National Transportation Safety Board in the US.

CNN’s Taylor Ward, Tara John, Alexandra Skores, Mitchell McCluskey, Amir Vera, Taylor Romine, Amanda Jackson, Elise Hammond and Karina Tsui contributed to this report.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.