New video captures moment Delta flight crash-landed in Toronto
Montreal: New footage of the Delta Air Lines plane crash in Toronto gives a clear view of the jet hitting the tarmac hard before rolling on its side, bursting into flames and flipping upside down.
In the video, taken from the cockpit of another plane waiting on the tarmac, the CRJ900 jet does not appear to noticeably “flare” upon landing, whereby pilots lift the nose to touch down on the rear wheels.
“It was a very forceful event where all of a sudden everything just kind of went sideways,” passenger Pete Carlson told CBC television in Canada. “Next I thing I know, it’s kind of a blink and I’m upside down, still strapped in.”
Aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, a former inspector-general at the US Transportation Department, told CNN it looked as though the rear landing gear may have collapsed on impact, along with the right wing shearing off. With the left wing still providing lift, that would have caused the plane to roll.
All 80 people on board the flight from Minneapolis – 76 passengers and four crew – survived the crash.Earlier video of the aftermath showed people walking away from the wreckage relatively unscathed as emergency crews doused the fuselage with water.
The plane involved was a Bombardier CRJ900, operated by Endeavor Air, a regional carrier and wholly owned subsiduary of Delta Air Lines, one of the major US airlines.
New footage gives a clear view of the Delta jet hitting the tarmac hard before rolling on its side, generating flames and flipping upside down.Credit: X/@airmainengineer
The incident occurred on Monday – a public holiday in most Canadian provinces – as the plane landed at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.
An updated statement from Delta said 21 injured passengers were initially taken to hospital and by Tuesday morning, local time, 19 had been released.
“Our most pressing priority remains taking care of all customers and Endeavor crew members who were involved,” Delta chief executive Ed Bastian said.
It was the fourth major aviation disaster in North America in three weeks. On January 29, a United States Army helicopter collided with an American Airlines passenger jet in Washington, DC, killing all 67 people in both aircraft, while at least seven people died when a medical transport plane crashed in Philadelphia two days later. Ten people were killed when a small passenger plane went down on Alaska’s west coast on February 6.
However, retired pilot and aviation safety expert John Cox told this masthead he saw no common links between the incidents.
“It’s just one of those things,” he said. “Low-probability events can happen. It’s very, very unfortunate, but you have to remember, aviation still is the safest form of transportation ever designed by humankind.”
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada will lead an investigation into the Toronto crash, assisted by the US National Transportation Safety Board.
Conditions at the airport were icy, windy and freezing after a snowstorm blew through the north-east of the continent at the weekend, dumping up to 25 centimetres of snow in Toronto.
Canadian government weather data indicated the temperature at the time was minus 9 degrees Celsius, with 51-kilometre-an-hour winds and gusts up to 65km/h.
Hours after the crash, the airport’s fire chief Todd Aitken told reporters that while the investigation had barely begun, and he did not want to speculate, “what we can say is that the runway was dry and there were no crosswind conditions”.
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