Delta Air Lines is offering passengers of a jet that caught fire and flipped over on a Toronto runway $30,000 each – “no strings attached”.
Flight 4819 crashed after touching down at Toronto’s Pearson airport on Monday afternoon. Videos of the crash were captured by witnesses and then passengers inside the plane.
Twenty-one of the plane’s 80 passengers and crew were initially transported to the hospital after the incident. All were released by Thursday, according to a statement from Delta. The flight was operated by the Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air. Canadian and American authorities are investigating the incident.
“It’s horrifying when you look at the video,” the Delta CEO, Ed Bastian, told CBS Mornings. “You can imagine when I received the text minutes after it happened, hearing there was a regional jet upside down on an active runway.
“The reality is safety is embedded into our system. Air travel in the United States is the safest form of travel.”
A spokesperson for Delta told CBS News that the $30,000 “gesture has no strings attached and does not affect rights”.
One of the passengers onboard the plane, paramedic Pete Carlson of Minnesota, told local news station KMSP: “For at least a brief period of time I thought, ‘I’m not getting off this plane.’
“The next thing I know, I’m upside down and my seatbelt was still belted,” he said.
The crash followed a large storm in Toronto that dumped 20in of snow on the city, with the airport struggling to catch up with a backlog of canceled and delayed flights.
The incident comes after a high-profile disaster in Washington DC, where a passenger plane collided in midair with a army Black Hawk helicopter, killing 67 people and sending both into the Potomac River. The crash was the worst air disaster in the US since 2001, and also highlighted years of warnings from air traffic controllers, who highlighted how employees in towers were understaffed and overworked.
In spite of the disaster, the Trump administration has sought to fire Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety workers and announced employees of SpaceX would consult at the agency, alarming European aviation experts.
SpaceX is owned by billionaire Elon Musk, an adviser to Trump, leading the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge). The FAA ordered an investigation into the breakup of a SpaceX rocket just a few days before Trump took office. The FAA is leaderless, after Musk called on the former head to resign.
