Montreal:

Passengers of a Delta Air Lines flight that crashed in Canada on Monday swung upside down from their seats after their plane flipped over on the tarmac, videos posted on social media showed.

In one video posted on Snapchat, passenger Ashley Zook appeared to be dangling from her seat inside the plane, whose lights had gone out, strapped in place by her seatbelt.

Moments later, the video cut to Zook walking beside the overturned plane as she was buffeted by the wind.

“I was just in a plane crash, oh my god,” she said breathlessly.

Breaking: Snapchat story from passenger on Delta Airlines flight, 4819 on tail number N932XJ after it has crashed in Toronto Pearson international.

Read MORE: https://t.co/ITHXLxDVbk pic.twitter.com/3LIW3dCUy4

— @PrivateJetClubs (@privatejetclubs) February 17, 2025

The plane lay on its back on the snowy ground at Toronto airport, where temperatures dropped well below freezing on Monday.

Skier Pete Koukov, another passenger, shared another video on Instagram, filming himself climbing out of the plane door as a flight attendant in an Endeavor Air uniform helped people get out.

“Drop everything, drop everything, come on,” the flight attendant urged, balanced on the underside of the wing.

Standing outside, Koukov cursed repeatedly as he walked away from the plane.

“I was just on this f*****g plane,” he said, as others behind him staggered out of the aircraft, some clutching belongings.

“Being alive feels pretty cool today,” he wrote in the video description.

Rescue services in the background sprayed water at the jet, whose underside was scraped and blackened.

Koukov later told CNN that “we were upside down hanging like bats” and that “didn’t know anything was the matter” until the plane hit the ground.

Fellow passenger John Nelson said in the same interview that he had heard explosions.

“When we got finished, I was upside down, everybody else was there as well,” he said. “We tried to get out of there as quickly as possible.”

The Endeavor Air flight 4819 had been carrying 80 people — 76 passengers and four crew — when it tried to land at around 3:30 pm in Canada’s biggest city, having flown from Minneapolis in the US state of Minnesota.

Emergency services confirmed 18 people were injured in the accident, with no fatalities.

Peter Carlson, another passenger on the flight, told CBC that “the absolute initial feeling is just need to get out of this.”

“What I saw was everyone on that plane suddenly became very close, in terms of how to help one another, how to console one another,” he said.

Delta said initial reports showed no fatalities, and promised to share further details as it confirmed them.

Airlines in Toronto had added flights to their schedule to make up for weekend cancellations following a massive snow storm.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Toronto:

At least 18 people were injured after a Delta Air Lines regional jet flipped upside down upon landing at Canada’s Toronto Pearson Airport on Monday amid windy weather following a snowstorm. There were 80 people aboard the US carrier’s flight that originated at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Authorities said three people on the flight, including a child, suffered critical injuries. There is no report of any casualty so far. 

Canadian authorities said they would investigate the cause of the crash, which was not yet known.

Caught On Camera

A passenger named Pete Koukov posted a video on Instagram of his rescue by authorities from inside the plane after it crashed. The footage shows passengers being evacuated from an upside-down aircraft as a fire engine sprayed water on it from outside.

Footage captured by another survivor of the accident is also doing rounds on social media showing a female passenger suspended upside down in her seat after the plane had overturned.

“My plane crashed I’m upside down,” she wrote alongside the recording.

The video then showed frightened travellers scrambling to exit the aircraft while making their way to safety. “I was just in a plane crash, oh my god,” the distressed passenger remarked.

BREAKING: STUNNED TORONTO PLANE CRASH SURVIVOR SHARES VIDEO OF MOMENT DELTA JET FLIPPED

DELTA AIRLINE WAS THE ONLY US AIRLINE TO RESIST COMPLYING WITH DONALD TRUMP‘S EXECUTIVE ORDER TO END DEI POLICIES

A Delta passenger plane carrying 76 people crashed at Toronto’s Pearson… pic.twitter.com/0jNOXcawyi

— SANTINO (@MichaelSCollura) February 17, 2025

Another passenger John Nelson also posted a video of the aftermath on Facebook, showing a fire engine spraying water on the plane that was lying belly-up on the snow-covered tarmac.

Terrifying footage from John Nelson, a passenger on Delta Flight #DL4819. The plane flipped upside down upon landing in Toronto after a 1.5 hour trip from Minneapolis, MN.

Miraculously, only 8 of 60 passengers are reported injured. The rest have walked off unharmed. pic.twitter.com/P7qbMBj0IQ

— Jordan Rhone (@JordanRhone) February 17, 2025

He later told CNN there was no indication of anything unusual before landing.

“We hit the ground, and we were sideways, and then we were upside down,” Nelson told the television network.

“I was able to just unbuckle and sort of fall and push myself to the ground. And then some people were kind of hanging and needed some help being helped down, and others were able to get down on their own,” he said.

Chronology Of The Crash 

Earlier on Monday, Pearson Airport said it was dealing with high winds and frigid temperatures as airlines attempted to catch up with missed flights after a weekend snowstorm dumped more than 22 cm (8.6 inches) of snow at the airport.

The Delta plane touched down in Toronto at 2:13 p.m. (1913 GMT) after an 86-minute flight and came to rest near the intersection of Runway 23 and Runway 15, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24.

“The aircraft is upside down and burning,” an emergency worker told the air traffic control tower after a controller noted that some passengers were walking near the crashed plane, according to a recording of the incident posted on liveatc.net.

Deborah Flint, president of the Toronto airport, attributed the absence of fatalities in part to the work of first responders at the airport.

“We are very grateful that there is no loss of life and relatively minor injuries,” she said at a press conference.

Michael J. McCormick, associate professor of air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the upside-down position made the crash fairly unique.

“But the fact that 80 people survived an event like this is a testament to the engineering and the technology, the regulatory background that would go into creating a system where somebody can actually survive something that not too long ago would have been fatal,” he said.

Airport Delays

Delta, in a statement, said a CRJ900 aircraft operated by its Endeavor Air subsidiary was involved in a single-aircraft accident with 76 passengers and four crew members on board. The 16-year-old CRJ900, made by Canada’s Bombardier and powered by GE Aerospace engines, can seat up to 90 people.

All 18 of the people injured were passengers and were taken to area hospitals, Delta said in a statement.

Of those injured, two were airlifted to trauma centres, and a child was transported to a children’s hospital, said Supervisor Lawrence Saindon of Peel Regional Paramedic Services.

The Toronto airport was shut down for more than two hours before departures and arrivals resumed. This led to ground delays and diversions to other airports including Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, which said it was preparing to receive several diverted flights that might cause further delays.

Flint said on Monday evening there would be some operational impact and delays at Toronto Airport over the next few days while two runways remained closed for the investigation.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) said it was deploying a team of investigators, and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said a team of investigators would assist Canada’s TSB.

Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which closed a deal to buy the CRJ aircraft program from Bombardier in 2020, said it was aware of the incident and would fully cooperate with the investigation.

The crash in Canada followed other recent crashes in North America. An Army helicopter collided with a CRJ-700 passenger jet in Washington, killing 67 people, while at least seven people died when a medical transport plane crashed in Philadelphia and 10 were killed in a passenger plane crash in Alaska.