Footage emerged Tuesday of passengers “hanging upside down like bats” inside the Delta Air Lines jet that flipped upon landing in Toronto the day before.
The jaw-dropping clip, recorded by a passenger who was inverted himself, shows a shockingly calm cabin—save for some muffled shouts—with survivors typing on their phones as they dangled in the air, possibly still in shock about what had happened.
“We hit the ground and we were sideways, and then we were hanging upside down like bats,” Peter Koukov told ABC News. “It all happened pretty, pretty fast.”
Koukov said some passengers dangled helplessly until rescuers arrived to safely bring them down. His own recording showed the flight crew ushering those who were able to get down safely off the Bombardier CRJ-900 that had taken off from Minneapolis.
Pete Carlson, another passenger, said he was also shocked with how quickly the dramatic scene played out.
“The one minute you’re landing and kind of waiting to see your friends and your people and the next minute you’re physically upside down and just really turned around,” he told ABC.
John Nelson, a third passenger, said many on board opted to calmly dangle from their seats at first because the flight crew instructed them to. Passengers took matters into their own hands not long after, he said, adding that he helped bring down those around him after he undid his seatbelt and plopped onto the plane’s ceiling, which had become its floor.
“You heard the flight attendants yelling, ‘Open the door. Everybody, take your stuff and get out now,’” he recounted to ABC. “We all worked together and got out of there as quickly as we could.”
There were 80 people on board the flight, including its 76 passengers—of which 22 were Canadian nationals—and four flight crew.
Perhaps miraculously, there were no fatalities in the crash. However, three people—a child, a man in his 60s, and a woman in her 40s—were rushed to a hospital in critical condition, officials said. A total of 21 passengers required hospitalization, the airline later said, but all but two had been released by Tuesday morning.
A definitive cause for the crash is yet to be identified by authorities.
Pilots and aviation experts have noted the jet appeared to make a hard landing before it was stripped of one wing and overturned in a fireball. An air traffic control recording said the aircraft was being battered by winds as fierce as 40 mph before landing—part of a nasty winter storm sweeping across the region.
While some reports described the runway as “icy” with winds gusting to 70 mph at landing, the airport’s fire chief, Todd Aitken, told reporters the surface was actually “dry” and “there was no crosswind conditions” at landing.
Despite being on foreign soil, the crash is sure to put pressure on Donald Trump’s administration. It’s the fourth high-profile aviation crash involving American planes within his first month back in office—a period that has been particularly tumultuous within the Federal Aviation Administration.
About 400 termination emails went out to FAA staffers on Friday as part of Trump’s far-reaching cuts to the federal government’s workforce and overall spending.
The timing of the firings has left many scratching their heads, as it comes on the heels of the midair collision of a U.S. Army helicopter and American Airlines jet on Jan. 29 that killed 67; a medical transport plane crashing in Philadelphia that killed six; and the Bering Air passenger flight that crashed in Alaska on Feb. 6 and killed 10.
