A plane crashed and flipped on its back at Toronto’s Pearson airport Monday afternoon, injuring at least eight passengers and closing down the airport’s runways.
The airport didn’t immediately provide further information on the nature of the emergency, but a photo submitted to CBC from a passenger shows a plane flipped on its back.
All passengers and crew are accounted for, the airport said in a post to X just before 3 p.m.
Pearson airport’s runways are now closed until at least Tuesday, according to a notice to aviation officials.
Ornge Air Ambulance, Ontario’s air ambulance service, says a child was taken to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children with critical injuries, while a man in his 60s and a woman in her 40s were also taken to Toronto hospitals with critical injuries.
Three air ambulance helicopters and two critical care land ambulances were dispatched to the scene, Ornge said.
Peel Region paramedics say eight passengers in total were hurt.
Video posted to Facebook shows people getting off a plane flipped upside down on a runway as a fire truck sprays water on the overturned aircraft. Toronto’s Pearson airport said in a post on X that it was responding to an emergency involving a plane arriving from Minneapolis on Monday afternoon.
A superintendent with the Peel Region paramedic service says all of the other roughly 80 passengers and crew are accounted for and not believed to be injured at this time.
Const. Sarah Patten of the Peel Regional Police in Ontario told Reuters that most of the passengers were unharmed “but we’re still trying to make sure so we’re still on scene investigating.”
The airport said earlier in the day that it was expecting a busy day on Monday as airlines catch up after 22 centimetres of snowfall over the weekend, which caused a mass of delays and cancellations. Over 130,000 travellers were expected to board around 1,000 flights, it said in a post on Monday morning.
The Delta Air Lines plane has capacity for 95 seats and was built by Bombardier Inc., according to an aircraft registration posted on FlightAware, an online flight tracking platform. It has been registered to Delta Airlines since January 2010, according to the website.
Federal Transport Minister Anita Anand says she’s closely following the “serious incident” via a post on X.
