Passengers have said they were left dangling upside down as aviation fuel ran down the windows when their plane flipped over during landing in Toronto.
All 80 people on board were evacuated but 18 were injured, three of them critically – including a child.
It happened on Monday afternoon at Pearson Airport, with video showing passengers miraculously walking off the upturned jet.
The Delta Airlines jet, a Bombardier CRJ900, was arriving from Minneapolis-St. Paul in the US when it flipped over.
The cause is so far unknown, but passengers said the crash seemed to happen in seconds.
“We hit the ground, and we were sideways, and then we were upside down,” John Nelson told CNN.
“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.”
Another passenger, Peter Carlson, told CBS News: “All the sudden everything just kind of went sideways and then next thing I know it’s kind of a blink and I’m upside down still strapped in.”
Mr Carlson fell down on to the ceiling when he unbuckled and said he smelled fuel and saw it streaming down the windows.
He said he knew he needed to get out quickly in case a fire started, but that he and another man first helped free a mother and her young son.
At least one of the wings was broken off after the crash but the main body appeared intact, according to video of the scene.
The snow is still falling at the airport.
Since it started yesterday, we’ve already had 12.2 cm of snow accumulate as of 8 a.m. The latest forecast shows we could see an additional 15 cm today.
In total, we’ve had 53.6 cm of snow this past week. To put that into perspective,… pic.twitter.com/BjU02zmbVI
— Toronto Pearson (@TorontoPearson) February 16, 2025
The Canadian airport had more than 22cm (8.6in) of snow over the weekend, and earlier on Monday had said it was dealing with high winds and freezing temperatures.
Audio from the control tower shows it warned the Delta flight of a possible air flow “bump” on the approach.
Tracking website Flightradar24 also said indications suggested a “gusting crosswind and blowing snow” but the airport’s fire chief, Todd Aitken, disputed that analysis.
Emergency personnel got to the plane within a few minutes and the response “went as planned”, Mr Aitken added.
Canada’s Transportation Safety Board and its US equivalent are now investigating what caused the jet – operated by Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air – to flip over so dramatically.
Delta chief executive Ed Bastian said “the hearts of the entire global Delta family are with those affected.”
Michael J. McCormick, a professor of air traffic management, said the fact everyone survived was “a testament to the engineering and the technology [and] the regulatory background”.
He added that “not too long ago” such an incident would likely have been fatal.
Aircraft flipping over, while rare, is not unheard of.
Two pilots died in 2009 when a FedEx plane crashed during landing in Tokyo, and a decade earlier a China Airlines flight also inverted, killing three of the 315 people on board.
Another incident involving a FedEx cargo flight happened in Newark in 1997 – but no one died.
All those crashes involved a McDonnell Douglas’s MD-11 aircraft.
Flights have restarted at Pearson Airport but passengers have been warned of lingering delays over the next few days.
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