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Key Points
- A Delta Air Lines jet with 80 people onboard crash-landed on Tuesday at Toronto’s main airport.
- Authorities confirmed 18 people had been injured in the accident, with no fatalities.
- Dramatic images on local broadcasts and shared on social media showed people stumbling away from the upside down CRJ-900 plane.
Passengers of a Delta Air Lines flight that crashed in Canada on Tuesday 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.
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 Endeavour 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 fucking 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 they “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 Endeavour 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 they confirmed them.
Airlines in Toronto had added flights to their schedule to make up for weekend cancellations following a massive snowstorm.
