Passenger who dangled upside down after Toronto plane crash says he's lucky to be alive
Verified video shows the moment plane erupts in flames and flips during landing
Pete Carlson didn't think his life would be turned upside down when he boarded a Delta Air Lines flight in Minneapolis, but that's literally what happened after the plane touched down in Toronto.
The plane carrying 76 passengers and four crew members crashed at Pearson International Airport on Monday, flipping onto its back and injuring 21 passengers. In a statement Tuesday morning, Delta said 19 of those patients have been released from hospital. Ornge, Ontario's air ambulance service, said a child was taken to Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children with critical injuries.
"Everything just kind of went sideways," Carlson, an American health-care worker who was travelling to Toronto for a paramedics conference, told The National's Adrienne Arsenault in an interview Monday about the plane's "forceful" landing.
"One minute you're landing, kind of waiting to see your friends and your people, and the next minute you're physically upside down," he said, adding it's "really amazing" that he's alive.
Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 was landing at Pearson airport from Minneapolis just after 2 p.m. ET when it crashed. The plane was a Bombardier Canadair Regional Jet with 76 seats operated by Endeavor Air, a regional airline subsidiary of Delta Air Lines based in Minneapolis.
Deborah Flint, president and CEO of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) said during a news conference Tuesday she would "not speculate" on the cause of the crash, nor on the state of the runway.
She did note, however, that 50 centimetres of snow fell on Pearson during back-to-back storms on Thursday and Sunday. It was more snow than the airport saw all of last winter.
Carlson described the intensity of metal making contact with concrete, with the smell of gas soon to follow. Passengers were on the plane's ceiling, which was now the floor.
After that, he said, there was a purposefulness among many of the passengers. His paramedic training and paternal instincts kicked in, as he tended to an injured woman and child, while helping free another woman who had ended up underneath a seat.
Carlson called the response of local police, fire and paramedics "amazing."
"They quickly put those of us that were injured with any sort of blood or sign of trauma onto a single bus, moved us a safe distance away and started to triage and really assess people's severity of injury or ailment," he said.
Another passenger, Pete Koukov, also described hanging upside down in the moments after the crash and unbuckling from his seat to disembark from the plane.
"I'm still not sure if it's even hit me yet," he said in an interview with CBC News. "Some of it doesn't feel real."
Koukov said his back was "a little sore" but that he was "relatively OK considering the circumstances."
Verified videos show plane flipping on landing
Social media videos verified by CBC News show the plane approaching the snowy runway normally, then skidding. Flames are visible at the back of the aircraft as it skids, then turns onto its back and continues to slide across the runway, trailing back smoke.
Other videos show passengers recording themselves hanging upside down in the plane, and people being helped out of the aircraft and walking across the runway. "We were upside down hanging like bats," a passenger told CNN.
Other passengers expressed shock, with videos showing people swearing and crying.
"I was just in a plane crash. Oh my God," one woman said tearfully after exiting the plane.
During Tuesday's news conference, GTAA fire Chief Todd Aitken said he believes most of the passengers "self-evacuated." This was in response to a question about whether first responders had to cut people out of their seatbelts.
A representative for Peel Regional Paramedic Services said they were dealing with "a multitude of different injuries," including back sprains, head injuries, anxiety, as well as headaches, nausea and vomiting due to fuel exposure.
"Drop everything! Drop it, come on," a flight attendant can be heard shouting in one of the videos taken shortly after the crash.
Lucy Ghanime, a retired flight attendant, told CBC News Network on Tuesday that flight attendants are trained to tell passengers to leave everything behind during an emergency to prevent to slowdown of evacuation. She says in general, you have about 90 seconds to get everyone out of a crash, and filming it slows down the process.
"Don't stick around. You never know if this could explode," she said.
All passengers and crew members managed to escape after the plane turned upside down, according to Flint, Of those on board, 22 were Canadian.
Crashes still rare
The spate of recent aviation disasters and close calls may have people worried about the safety of flying. Last month's midair collision that killed 67 near Washington, the fiery plane crash in Philadelphia and a downed plane in Alaska are only the most high-profile disasters.
Still, the U.S. National Safety Council estimates that Americans have a 1-in-93 chance of dying in a motor vehicle crash, while deaths on airplanes are too rare to calculate the odds. Figures from the U.S. Department of Transportation tell a similar story.
In Canada, the Transportation Safety Board notes there were 182 accidents reported in 2023, and 33 fatalities. That's 10 per cent higher than the previous year but 17 per cent below the yearly average of 220 accidents reported in the prior 10 years.
Most accidents involved privately owned airplanes, helicopters, flight training, and air taxis.
"In general, the number of air transportation accidents has decreased in the last decade," the board says in its most recent report.
In 2005, Air France Flight 358 went off the runway at Toronto's Pearson airport. The Airbus A340-313 had come in for a landing just after 4 p.m. that day, during a powerful thunderstorm. It then skidded off the runway, came to rest in a ravine and caught fire. Everyone survived.
'People together helping each other'
Carlson said it felt like he was "stepping onto the tundra" after climbing out the plane.
"I didn't care how cold it was, I didn't care how far I had to walk, how long I had to stand. All of us just wanted to be out of the aircraft," he said.
Carlson eventually got into contact with his immediate family and some friends and colleagues. He wasn't sure exactly when in the sequence of events he received a large cut on the top of his head.
"[I'm] a little balder than I was this morning," he joked.
Carlson, still smelling of gasoline at the time of interview, said he was looking forward to a shower after a "powerful" experience with fellow passengers.
It was "just people, no countries, nothing," he said. "It was just people together helping each other."
With files from CBC Toronto and The Associated Press