‘It was mass chaos. I was upside down’: Aviation safety in spotlight as North American crash tally grows

Montreal: Aviation safety is under the microscope after a passenger plane crash-landed in Toronto, Canada, flipping on its back and injuring 18 people, in the fourth major air accident in North America in three weeks.

Dramatic video posted online showed the Delta Air Lines jet belly up on a snow-covered tarmac, with people walking away from the plane, seemingly unhurt. One man could be heard saying: “We’re in Toronto. We just landed. Our plane crashed. It’s upside down.”

A Delta Air Lines plane lies overturned after crashing earlier in the day at Toronto Pearson International Airport, Canada.Credit: Getty Images

Experts credited the remarkable lack of fatalities in Toronto to seats designed to withstand significant g-forces, as well as speedy and professional action from the flight crew and emergency responders.

All 80 people aboard – 76 passengers and four crew – survived the crash, which occurred about 2.15pm on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) as the Delta flight from Minneapolis touched down at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

The airport’s fire chief, Todd Aitken, said 18 people were taken to hospital, and Ontario’s air ambulance service, Ornge, said three – a man in his 60s, a woman in her 40s and a child – had sustained critical injuries.

Passenger John Nelson, who filmed the viral video of people escaping the plane, told news organisation CNN that conditions were gusty as the plane landed.

“[The landing] was routine, but it was noticeable the runways were kind of in a weird condition,” he said. The plane hit the tarmac “super hard” and bounced, Nelson said, adding, “I believe we skidded on our side and then flipped over on our back”.

A fireball then broke out, Nelson said. “It was mass chaos. I was upside down. A lady next to me was upside down,” he told CNN. “Everybody was just like, ‘Get out, get out, get out’. We could smell jet fuel.”

Weather was certain to be a focus of the investigation, which would be led by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada with assistance from 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 was minus 9 degrees Celsius, with 51-kilometre-an-hour winds and gusts up to 65km/h.

However, 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”.

The plane involved was a Bombardier CRJ900 operated by regional carrier Endeavor Air, a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines.

“The hearts of the entire global Delta family are with those affected by today’s incident,” the company’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, said.

Flights on the remaining runways have resumed, though Delta said it had cancelled flights to and from Toronto for the rest of the day.

The crash in Canada follows three major deadly aviation incidents in North America in the past month. A United States Army helicopter collided with an American Airlines passenger jet in Washington, DC, on January 29, 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.

The spate of crashes has inevitably sparked concern about the safety of flying in North America. But 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.”

Cox said the severed right wing of the Delta aircraft would be of interest to investigators, along with the weather – although professional pilots were trained to fly in gusty conditions, and planes were built to withstand them.

The crashes come as the Trump administration targets the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which regulates air safety. Transport Secretary Sean Duffy posted on social media platform X that 400 of the agency’s 45,000 staff were fired, although he said they were probationary employees and none were air traffic controllers or critical safety personnel.

Duffy also revealed that members of Elon Musk’s SpaceX team were visiting the US Air Traffic Control System Command Centre in Virginia this week to get a firsthand look “and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system”.

Musk and US President Donald Trump have been highly critical of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) employment practices in the federal government, particularly at the FAA. In the immediate aftermath of the deadly Washington crash, Trump claimed – without evidence – that DEI was to blame.

Cox, who is chief executive of consulting firm Safety Operating Systems, said: “It’s hard for me to understand when we have an older air traffic control system that requires a lot of maintenance … that you would want to reduce staff.”

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