Video shows Toronto plane’s hard landing before flipping

Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - The Delta Air Lines plane that crashed and injured at least 18 passengers at Toronto Pearson International Airport attempted to land amid strong winds and snow. – Pic by AFP

TORONTO, Feb 19 – Dramatic new footage released today showed a passenger plane hitting the runway hard and flipping upside down at Toronto’s main airport, as investigations began into the cause of the crash.

A fireball and thick plumes of black smoke engulfed the Delta Air Lines plane as it skidded to a halt on its roof on Monday, but none of the 80 people on board were killed.

“The crew of Delta Flight 4819 heroically led passengers to safety, evacuating a jet that had overturned on the runway on landing, amidst smoke and fire,” Toronto airport authority chief executive Deborah Flint told a news conference.

She said Canada’s Transportation Safety Board had deployed 20 investigators to the site where the Bombardier CRJ-900 crashed.

The agency said in a statement yesterday evening it had recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, which were sent to a laboratory for examination.

“It is far too early to determine the cause of the accident,” the agency said.

Canada’s investigators will be assisted by the US Federal Aviation Administration and representatives from Delta and Mitsubishi, which purchased the CRJ line of planes from Bombardier in 2019.

Injuries sustained in the crash ranged from “minor to critical, but not life-threatening,” Flint said.

Delta said 21 passengers were transported to hospitals, and so far, 19 had been released.

Paramedic services told AFP on Monday that three people had been critically injured – a child, a man in his 60s, and a woman in her 40s.

Black smoke

The flight with 76 passengers and four crew was landing in the afternoon in Canada’s largest city after a flight from Minneapolis in the US state of Minnesota.

The video posted to social media and verified by AFP was taken from the cockpit of another jetliner waiting on the tarmac.

It showed the plane coming in for a normal landing before slamming into the runway, then sliding forward in a roll to the right, with its wings sheared off before it stopped on its back.

Flames could be seen shooting out of the fuselage and black smoke billowing out.

“Oh no, no, no, no, no,” the pilot is heard saying in the video that was laced with expletives.

Rescue services responded, spraying water at the jet, whose underside was scraped and blackened.

Todd Aitken, the airport’s fire chief, said rescue teams saw isolated fires when they got to the scene.

“They were able to quickly knock down the spot fires” and enter and search the plane, he told reporters today.

Most of the passengers had already “self-evacuated,” he added.

Smell of jet fuel

Corey Tkatch of the area’s paramedic services said emergency responders dealt with a “multitude of different injuries” including back sprains, head injuries, anxiety, and headaches.

Passengers reported smelling jet fuel as they exited the plane. Some suffered from nausea and vomiting due to the fuel exposure, he said.

In the days prior to Monday’s crash, two massive snowstorms hit eastern Canada, dumping 70 centimetres (more than two feet) of snow, which Flint said was “more snow than we received in all of last winter.”

Strong winds and bone-chilling temperatures could still be felt in Toronto on Monday when airlines added flights to make up for weekend cancellations due to the storm.

The Toronto crash was the latest in a recent string of air incidents in North America, including a mid-air collision between a US Army helicopter and a passenger jet in Washington that killed 67 people, and a medical transport plane crash in Philadelphia that left seven dead. – AFP