THE Delta plane crash that left 21 people injured in Toronto was comparable to something seen in a Denzel Washington thriller film, an expert has said.

Passengers were left “hanging like bats” following the impact of the smash at Toronto Pearson Airport on Monday.

Dramatic footage showed the Bombardier CRJ900 plane, carrying 76 people and four crew, bursting into a fireball as it smashed into the icy runway.

The plane, which departed Minneapolis, flipped upside down and passengers sprawled to safety in a frantic evacuation effort.

No one was killed in the latest aviation incident to hit North America.

Flight expert Scott Keyes, the mastermind behind the Going travel app, said it’s too early to speculate about the cause of the crash.

“It’s certainly safe to call it a ‘freak accident’ and that may be understating just how rare a scene like this is,” he said.

“An inverted passenger plane is something moviegoers saw in Denzel Washington’s 2012 film Flight – not something we see in reality until today.”

In the movie, Washington, who plays the pilot Whip Whitaker, has to crash land his plane after it suffers a mechanical failure.

He has to take decisive action after the control systems went down.

Meanwhile, the passengers on board the plane are bracing for any potential impact.

The plane ends up inverted and Whitaker is hailed for preventing a catastrophe.

Survivors of the Toronto crash have since opened up on the horror that unfolded.

And, passengers filmed themselves inside the doomed jet as they scrambled to safety.

“We were upside down hanging like bats,” Peter Koukov told CNN.

He said it felt as if the passenger plane had turned sideways when it hit the tarmac.

John Nelson said he was upside down as well and recalled there was a chaotic scene on the aircraft.

“We tried to get out of there as quickly as possible.”

Nelson revealed he heard an explosion when he managed to clamber out of the plane.

“The absolute initial feeling is just need to get out of this,” passenger Peter Carlson told CBC News.

Carlson, who was heading to Toronto for a paramedics conference, said: “Everything just went sideways.”

CHAOTIC EVACUATION

Travelers evacuated the plane via its doors while fire crews rushed to the scene and doused the jet in fire retardant.

One child was injured and taken to a local children’s hospital, but officials said they are in “good condition.”

The cause of the plane crash has not been disclosed but safety analyst David Soucie speculated it could be related to a landing gear.

Toronto had been hit with strong winds and the city was blanketed in around eight inches of snow over the weekend.

The runway was dry but pilots had to navigate 32mph winds that were hitting the airport.

The communications between the pilot and the air traffic control tower were normal as the plane prepared to land, according to the CEO of Toronto Pearson airport.

Officials had warned the Delta pilot about the risks of a bumpy ride.

AUDIO WARNINGS

Audio captured the dialogue between a medical helicopter and ATC workers.

The copter had just left Toronto Pearson before it made a swift return.

“LifeFlight 1, Medevac, just so you are aware there are people outside walking around the aircraft there,” an air traffic controller worker told the helicopter pilot, according to LiveATC audio obtained by CNN.

“Yeah, we’ve got it. The aircraft is upside down and burning,” the helicopter pilot replied.

RECENT DISASTERS

North America has been left reeling following a string of air disasters.

On January 29, a Black Hawk military helicopter collided with an American Airlines passenger plane, killing 67 people in total.

The collision happened just as the passenger plane was about to land at Reagan National Airport in Virginia.

On January 31, a medical jet crashed seconds after take-off in Philadelphia, killing six people on board and one person on the ground.

A six-year-old girl, who had just received life-saving treatment and was en-route to Mexico, was among the fatalities.

And a commuter plane vanished from the radar before the wreckage was found off Alaska’s eastern coastline. Ten people died in the air disaster.