According to officials, a Delta Air Lines regional jet flipped upside down upon landing at Canada’s Toronto Pearson Airport. This incident occurred on Monday amid windy weather following a snowstorm, and 18 of the 80 people on board were injured.
Deborah Flint of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority said “We are very grateful there was no loss of life and relatively minor injuries.”
According to Toronto Pearson Airport, the crash involved a Delta Air Lines flight arriving from Minneapolis, and of the 80 people on board, 76 were passengers and four were crew.
The emergency services said three people suffered critical injuries, among them are a one child and two adults, who are a man in his 60s and a woman in her 40s. So, in all eighteen passengers were transported to the hospital in total.
Ontario Air Ambulance Service Ornge said it had dispatched three air ambulance helicopters and two land ambulances to the scene.
Ms Flint called the response by emergency personnel “textbook” and credited them with helping ensure no loss of life during an evening briefing.
The US Federal Aviation Authority said the plane involved was Delta Air Lines Flight 4819, being operated by one of its subsidiaries, Endeavor Air.
Delta confirmed that a CRJ900 aircraft was involved in the incident at about 14:15 ET (19:15 GMT) on Monday afternoon.
Miss Flint added that, twenty-two passengers are Canadian and the rest are “multinational.”
The airport was closed shortly after the incident, but flights into and out of Toronto Pearson resumed at about 17:00 local time.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada stated that it was deploying a team to “gather information and assess the occurrence”.
Two runways will remain closed for several days for investigation, and passengers have been told to expect some delays.
Toronto Pearson fire chief Todd Aitken said on Monday night that while it was early in the investigation, they could say “the runway was dry and there were no cross-wind conditions.”.
That contradicts earlier reports of wind gusts of more than 64km/h (40mph) and a crosswind.
Video footage shared on social media shows people clambering out of the overturned aircraft, with fire crews spraying it with foam.
The crash is at least the fourth major aviation incident in North America in the past month, including a deadly in-air collision between a passenger plane and a military helicopter near Washington, DC’s Ronald Reagan airport, which killed all 67 people on board.
