Pearson airport Delta plane crash: 'We're in Toronto ... we're upside down'

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“Our plane crashed. It’s upside down.”

Those words were spoken by Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 passenger John Nelson on a dramatic video he posted to Facebook from the tarmac at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport immediately after his plane from Minneapolis to Toronto crash-landed and flipped upside down on Monday afternoon, injuring 21 people, three of whom were hospitalized including a child brought to Sick Kids Hospital, according to officials.

There were 22 Canadians were on board; the rest of the 80 on the plane — 76 passengers and 4 crew — were internationals.

Toronto Pearson Fire Chief Todd Aitken said 18 passengers were taken to the hospital. Earlier, Ornge air ambulance said it was transporting one pediatric patient to Toronto’s SickKids hospital and two injured adults to other hospitals in the city.

The video posted by Nelson provided a glimpse into the dramatic turn of events.

“We’re in Toronto,” said Nelson, breathlessly doing a voiceover on the video. “We just landed. Our plane crashed. It’s upside down. Fire department’s on site. We’re upside down. Everybody, most people appear to be OK. We’re all getting off. There’s some smoke going on.”

Delta confirmed the incident via a statement on its website while airport officials also confirmed the crash with images posted on social media showing the plane flipped over on the tarmac.

“We are very grateful that there is no loss of life and relatively minor injuries,” Deborah Flint, CEO of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, said during a news conference on Monday night.

“No airport CEO wants to have these types of press conferences, but this is exactly what our emergency, our operations and our first-responder partners all practised and trained for.”

Peter Carlson, a passenger travelling to Toronto for a paramedics conference, said the landing was “very forceful.”

“All the sudden everything just kind of went sideways and then next thing I know it’s kind of a blink and I’m upside down still strapped in,” he told CBC News.

Carlson said when he took off his seat belt he crashed onto the ceiling, which had become the floor. He smelled gas, saw aviation fuel cascading down the cabin windows and knew he needed to get out but said his fatherly intuition and paramedic skills kicked in. He looked for those he could help.

He and another man assisted a mother and her young son out of the plane and then Carlson dropped onto the tarmac. Snow was blowing and it “felt like I was stepping onto tundra.”

“I didn’t care how cold it was, didn’t care how far I had to walk, how long I had to stand — all of us just wanted to be out of the aircraft,” he said.

Two runways at Pearson are closed and delays are expected for days to come, Pearson officials said in an update.

Images and videos posted on social media show the plane, a Mitsubishi CRJ-900LR, flipped over on the tarmac and passengers fleeing the jet as emergency crews respond to the scene.

Audio recording from the Pearson airport tower shows Delta Air Lines flight 4819 was cleared to land at about 2:10 p.m., and the tower warned the pilots of a possible air flow “bump” in the glide path from an aircraft in front of it.

There were no further conversations with the Delta flight until the tower confirmed at 2:12 p.m. that a plane has crashed, with air controllers quickly redirecting traffic to accommodate the crash scene.

The flight arrived from Minneapolis on Monday afternoon amid blowing snow following a winter storm that hit the Toronto region over the weekend.

Tower controllers were heard speaking with the crew of a medical helicopter that had just left Pearson and was returning to help with the crash. The plane came to a rest at the intersection of Runways 23 and 15L, the controller said. That’s not far from the start of the runway.

“Just so you’re aware, there’s people outside walking around the aircraft there,” a tower controller said.

“Yeah, we’ve got it. The aircraft is upside down and burning,” the medical helicopter pilot responded.

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Calgary’s Al Charest was en route to vacation in Orlando when the crash happened.

Watching the Canada-Finland 4 Nations Face-Off game in the Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge, alerts on the television screen and his phone indicated there was trouble.

“I went on social media and noticed the plane was on its roof,” he told The Toronto Sun, noting that his fellow travellers were already on edge due to delays and cancellations caused by the weekend’s snowstorm.

“Everybody’s watching the weather, but I think it kind of caught everybody off guard.”

There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he was “relieved there are no casualties” after the crash.

In a post on X, he said provincial officials were in contact with the airport and local authorities and would provide help as needed.

On Monday afternoon, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board confirmed a team of air crash investigators were en route to Toronto.

Air traffic control audio monitored by the Sun suggest no issues prior to the landing on Runway 23 — air crews contacting the Toronto control tower for permission to land made no mention of problems, but was warned of winds of 23 knots (43 km/h), with gusts of 33 knots (61 km/h), and a slight crosswind. 

According to the Meteorological Service of Canada, the airport was experiencing blowing snow and winds of 51 km/h, gusting to 65 km/h. The temperature was about -8.6C.

“It’s very rare to see something like this,” said John Cox, CEO of aviation safety consulting firm Safety Operating Systems in St. Petersburg, Fla. “We’ve seen a couple of cases of takeoffs where airplanes have ended up inverted, but it’s pretty rare.”

Cox, who flew for U.S. Air for 25 years and has worked on NTSB investigations, said the CRJ900 aircraft is a proven aircraft that’s been in service for decades and does a good job of handling inclement weather.

“The weather conditions were windy. The wind was out of the west at 27 to 35 knots, which is about 38 miles an hour. So it was windy. But the airplanes are designed and certified to handle that. The pilots are trained and experienced to handle that.”

Among the questions that need to be answered, Cox said, was why the plane was missing a right wing.

“If one wing is missing, it’s going to have a tendency to roll over,” he said. “Those are going to be central questions as to what happened to the wing and the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. They will be found, if not today, tomorrow, and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada will read them out and they will have a very good understanding of what actually occurred here.”

The last major crash at Pearson was in Aug. 2, 2005, when an Airbus A340 landing from Paris skidded off the runway and burst into flames amid stormy weather. All 309 passengers and crew aboard Air France Flight 358 survived the crash.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the Transportation Safety Board of Canada would head up the investigation and provide any updates. The National Transportation Safety Board said it is leading a team of U.S. investigators to assist in the Canadian investigation.

It is at least the fourth major aviation mishap in North America in the past month. A commercial jetliner and a military helicopter collided over Washington, D.C.,  on Jan. 29, killing 67 people. A medical transportation plane crashed in Philadelphia on Jan. 31, killing the six people on board and another person on the ground and 10 were killed in a plane crash in Alaska.

Endeavor Air, based in Minneapolis, is a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines and the world’s largest operator of CRJ-900 aircraft. The airline operates 130 regional jets on 700 daily flights to over 126 cities in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean, according to the company’s website.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a statement that “the hearts of the entire global Delta family are with those affected by today’s incident at Toronto-Pearson International Airport.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he has been in touch with Delta about the crash.

Pearson officials said on X that as of 5 p.m., departures and arrivals at the airport had resumed.

“GTAA staff are supporting families and passengers at arrivals,” the post said.

— with files The Canadian Press