A Delta Airlines plane landed overturned on a snow-blanketed runway at Toronto Pearson Airport and miraculously no one was killed in the aviation accident.
Delta Flight 4819, operated by Endeavor Air, flying from Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport touched down upside-down in Toronto at around 2.15 p.m. Monday. The aircraft was flying in the wake of a snowstorm and amid wind gusts that whipped at more than 40 mph.
Investigators are still trying to determine the cause of the crash-landing where all 80 people on board — 76 passengers and four crew members — survived. The airline said Tuesday morning that 19 of the 21 people taken to the hospital for treatment after sustaining injuries have been released.
“When I saw the first horrifying image of the Delta Airlines jet, overturned on the runway at Toronto, I feared there would be a heavy loss of life. Remarkably, everyone escaped alive from the plane,” said Simon Calder, The Independent’s travel expert. “Just like the last emergency evacuation at Toronto two decades ago, of an Air France plane, the cabin crew’s professionalism and training shone through and saved lives.”
Experts say different factors could have saved the passengers in the harrowing incident. Footage of the overturned plane seemed to show damage to one of the wings but the fuselage appeared to remain intact.
David Soucie, a former safety inspector at the FAA and current CNN safety analyst, discussed the importance of the “breakaway bolts on the wings.”
“It's testament to the fact that the engineering that goes behind these airplanes, you notice that both of the wings are off of the airplane right now. And that's by design,” he said on CNN Tuesday.
“They have breakaway explosive bolts that hold those wings on so that if the aircraft does go sideways, and it does hit the wing, if that wing was too stiff, it would tear the fuselage apart and dislodge the seats and damage the fuselage. But it's designed to allow that when it's a huge impact on the wing to strip those wings off. And then that aircraft can continue to move and come to rest safely,” Soucie said.
Greg Feith, a former air safety investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board, told The Hill that shedding both the wings was a “good thing.”
“That usually takes up a lot of the major impact forces. And because the tube, the fuselage tube, stayed intact, that’s what enhanced the survivability for all these people, even though there was a small fire that did break out,” he said.
"The sheer survivability of this is really amazing," Dan Ronan, a licensed pilot and journalist, told the BBC. He also noted the CRJ-900 plane’s seats, describing them as "designed to absorb a great deal of punishment."
Former NTSB official Peter Goetz also praised the plane’s seats, telling CNN on Tuesday: “Some 20 years ago, the Safety Board made a recommendation that all commercial air carriers have seats that can resist precisely this kind of accident, that they stay in place, that people are not ejected, that the seats are not ejected.”
“And time and time again, these 16G seats have saved lives. And I think we'll see again, as the analysis unfolds on this accident, that the 16G seats have saved lives once again,” Goetz continued.
Graham Braithwaite, director of aerospace and aviation at Cranfield University in the U.K., praised the engineering of the aircraft and the speediness of the flight crew to jump into action.
He told the Washington Post: “The fact that there were no fatalities with an aircraft left upside down on a runway tells you a lot about how the restraints worked, how the aircraft design worked, how the rescue teams responded and how the cabin crew played their role.”
Braithwaithe also emphasized how the cabin crew “put their lives on the line — they’re the last people off the airplane, and I think sometimes we forget that.” He said: “They serve us drink and food, and that’s wonderful, but their real function is to keep you safe.”
