Less than three weeks after a collision between a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and a passenger jet killed all 67 people aboard the two aircraft, another harrowing accident occurred when a Delta (DAL) plane landed at Toronto Pearson International Airport.
While all of the 80 people aboard the plane were evacuated without life-threatening injuries, dramatic images of an upside-down Bombardier CRJ900 (BDRAF) plane elicited shock and distress at a time when aviation safety is under a spotlight from both regulators and citizens.
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Traveling from Minneapolis to Toronto and operated by Endeavor Air, Delta's Flight 4819 was preparing to land at approximately 2:15 p.m. local time.
In a preliminary assessment of the situation, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a statement saying that the plane "crashed while landing" and caught fire on the way down.
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The 76 passengers and four crew members were all evacuated; 18 of the passengers were taken to nearby hospitals for evaluation, while two adults and one child were airlifted with critical injuries.
'We're in Toronto, our plane just crashed': passenger account
Several of the passengers aboard the flight captured footage of the crash from within the plane.
"We're in Toronto," John Nelson says in a video he posted on Facebook (META) in which he films other passengers getting out of the upside-down plane. "We just landed. Our plane crashed. It's upside-down."
“When we hit, it was just super hard — it hit the ground, and the plane went sideways,” Nelson later described to CNN while also recounting seeing "a big fireball" on the left side of the plane before feeling the impact.
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Ashley Zook, another passenger who was traveling on the flight from Minneapolis, posted a Snapchat story showing herself upside-down inside the cabin.
Canada's largest and busiest airport, Pearson, was shut down for just over two hours as emergency workers helped evacuate and transport passengers to nearby hospitals and investigators documented the immediate site of the crash.
Another passenger describes: 'Upside down hanging like bats'
An investigation into the cause of the crash by Canada's Transportation Safety Board is currently ongoing; the only update provided by Toronto Airport Fire Chief Todd Aiken as of the morning of Feb. 18 was that the "runway was dry and there was no cross-wind conditions" that could have contributed to the accident.
Aviation experts like Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University air traffic management professor Mike McCormick went on the record to explain that while modern planes are designed to withstand a landing on the back, such situations are extremely rare as the wind needs to be strong enough to send a heavy plane completely off balance. At the time of the crash, Toronto had winds of up to 40 miles per hour while a snowstorm had come just before but stopped by the time the plane had been preparing to land.
The plane had a cabin height of just under six feet; the small inside area helped minimize the impact when the plane flipped over.
"We were upside down hanging like bats," Peter Koukov, another passenger aboard the plane, described to CNN.
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