Video shows Toronto plane’s hard landing before flipping

TORONTO – Dramatic new footage released on Feb 18 showed

a passenger plane hitting the runway hard and flipping upside down

at Toronto’s airport, as investigations began into the cause of the crash.

A fire ball and thick plumes of black smoke engulfed the Delta Air Lines plane as it skidded to a halt on its roof on Feb 17 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 has deployed 20 investigators to the site where the Bombardier CRJ-900 crashed.

The agency said in a statement on Feb 18 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.

They will be assisted by the US Federal Aviation Administration and representatives from Delta and Mitsubishi, which purchased this line of planes from Bombardier in 2019.

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

Delta said 21 passengers were transported to hospitals.

Nineteen have been released so far.

Paramedic services told AFP on Feb 17 that three people had been critically injured – a child, a man in his 60s and a woman in her 40s.

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

Mr Todd Aitken, the airport’s fire chief, said late Feb 17 it was too early to determine the cause of the crash.

“It’s really important that we do not speculate. What we can say is the runway was dry and there was no crosswind conditions,” he said.

Black smoke

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.

Mr Aitkin said rescue teams saw isolated fires when they arrived at the scene.

“They were able to quickly knock down the spot fires” and enter and search the plane, he told reporters on Feb 19.

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

Mr 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 the Feb 17 crash, two massive snowstorms hit eastern Canada, dumping 70cm of snow, which Ms 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 Feb 17 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