A plane from Minneapolis crashed and flipped on its back when landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Monday afternoon. Here’s what we know so far:
Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 was landing at Pearson airport from Minneapolis just after 2 p.m. ET when the crash occurred. The plane was a Bombardier Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) with 76 seats operated by Endeavor Air, a regional airline subsidiary of Delta Air Lines based in Minneapolis.
A video posted in the private Facebook group, Toronto Pearson Aviation, shows the crash.
Shortly after the plane touches down on the runway, the right wing seems to collapse.
A burst of flames and smoke appear as the plane skids on the tarmac. The plane then flips onto its back, with black smoke billowing from it. It comes to a stop several metres from where it initially touched down.
A video posted in a private Facebook group called Toronto Pearson Aviation shows the Delta plane coming in for a landing on Monday, sliding, and then rolling as flames and smoke billow.
All 76 passengers and four crew members managed to escape after the plane turned upside down, according to Deborah Flint, president and CEO of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA). Of those on board, 22 were Canadian.
The number of injured has fluctuated in reports from officials since the crash happened. In a post on X Tuesday morning, Delta Air Lines said 21 people were taken to hospital and 19 of those have since been released.
Ornge, Ontario’s air ambulance service, said 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.
Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, Flint said none of the injuries were life-threatening. Airport officials could not confirm whether the child is one of two passengers who remains in hospital.
Injuries on scene mainly stemmed from back strains, head injuries, anxiety and headaches, as well as nausea and vomiting caused by exposure to fuel, said Cory Tkatch, a commander of operations for Peel Regional Paramedic Services, during the news conference.
The survival of everyone on board may have resulted from the durability of the plane’s seats and the way the crash unfolded, said David McNair, a former Transportation Safety Board of Canada investigator.
“The rolling impact, although uncomfortable and unpleasant, is not as bad as having a direct impact somewhere,” he said in an interview on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning on Tuesday.
A plane from Minneapolis crashed when landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport Monday afternoon. David McNair, a former Transportation Safety Board of Canada investigator, analyzes how unlikely it is that only three people were critically injured in the incident.
Their survival is “a credit to the firefighting team at Toronto Pearson, the pilots [and] the aircraft manufacturer,” said John Gradek, an operations and integrated aviation management professor at McGill University, during an interview with Metro Morning on Tuesday.
Flight attendants and flight crews, as well as airport emergency workers and responders, “mounted a textbook response” to the crash, Flint said on Tuesday. They reached the site in minutes and quickly evacuated passengers, she said.
At this time, officials have not provided details on what caused the crash, saying it is under investigation. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is leading that probe, Pearson airport said in a post on X on Monday evening.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board also said on social media that it is assisting with the investigation.
Gradek said the investigation will unfold “fairly quickly,” in part because surviving flight crew can speak to investigators. A report can be expected within the next 30 days, with a more detailed report to follow in a year or so, he said.
Audio recording from Pearson’s air traffic control tower shows the flight was cleared to land shortly after 2 p.m. ET and that the tower warned the pilots of a possible air flow “bump” in the glide path from an aircraft in front of it, according to a report from The Canadian Press.
Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada and members of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration are at Pearson airport, Flint said on Tuesday.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is on site, as the company owns the CRJ aircraft program sold to it by Bombardier Inc., the company that manufactured the plane. Representatives from Delta Air Lines are also at the airport, she said.
Flint said she expects the Transportation Safety Board of Canada to release a statement with more information about the investigation Monday afternoon.
Todd Aitken, the GTAA’s fire chief, told reporters on Monday night that the runway conditions were dry and there were no crosswinds.
But McNair said the instructions given to pilots just before the landing indicated the crosswind was up to 17 knots. A notice to airmen also mentioned there was snow on the runway.
Video posted to social media by several passengers show the fraught moments after a plane crashed and flipped on its back at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport on Monday afternoon. ‘I was just in a plane crash. Oh my God,’ says one woman who filmed herself upside down in her airplane seat.
Fifty centimetres of snow fell at Pearson airport last week after back-to-back winter storms walloped Toronto, Flint said on Tuesday. In a post on X before the crash on Monday morning, the airport said crews worked “all weekend to keep the roughly 5 million square metres of airfield clear of snow.”
Yes, Pearson is still open, “with flights arriving and departing,” according to a post by the airport on X Tuesday morning. But passengers are being urged to check their flight status before arriving at the airport.
The flipped plane will remain on the runway while investigators review it — a process Flint said is expected to take 48 hours. Until this review is complete, two runways will remain closed, which is affecting flight traffic, particularly how many planes are departing Pearson, she said.
FlightAware, a flight tracking website, reported there were 147 flight cancellations at Pearson airport on Tuesday morning. CBC Toronto has reached out to the airport to confirm these numbers.
Hundreds of flights were cancelled from Thursday to Sunday due to the weather, Flint said. Monday was intended to be an “operational recovery day,” she said, but 462 of 1,006 scheduled flights were cancelled, in part due to the accident.
Dan Milewski, who is from Toronto, was booked for an Air Canada flight to Calgary at 8:40 a.m. on Tuesday. He said it was cancelled around 1 a.m.
Airline officials said they would get back to him in 30 minutes, but when they called, “they basically said, ‘We’ve got nothing,'” he said.
Milewski said Air Canada told him the cancellation was “due to airport restrictions.”
He said he waited in line for two hours at the airport and is currently booked for a flight Wednesday morning.
