A Delta Air Lines plane crash-landed and flipped upside-down at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Monday, the latest aviation accident involving a regional jet operated by a US carrier.
The US Federal Aviation Administration said that Delta flight 4819 “crashed while landing” at the Canadian airport on Monday afternoon. The Bombardier CRJ-900 aircraft originated from Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport, a Delta hub.
“All 80 people on board were evacuated,” the FAA said. Delta said the plane was carrying 76 passengers and four crew members.
Photos and videos from the scene showed the aeroplane lying belly-up on a snowy, windswept tarmac. Heavy snow fell in the Toronto area over the weekend, with roughly 25cm on the ground.
Delta said that 18 people were taken to local hospitals for treatment. Officials said one of the hospitalised passengers was a child and that two patients had to be transported by air ambulance.
There were “no fatalities” and none of the patients had life-threatening injuries, according to Lawrence Saindon, superintendent with Peel Regional Paramedic Services. “All other patients are mild to walking-wounded injuries,” he added.
Canada’s Transportation Safety Board said it was “deploying a team to investigate” the accident. US federal investigators were also on their way to the accident site, said transportation secretary Sean Duffy.
The crash halted flights going in and out of Toronto Pearson for more than two hours, though they resumed at about 5.00pm local time. Almost 600 flights from or headed to the airport were cancelled or delayed, according to tracking site FlightAware.
Delta has cancelled all of its flights in and out of Toronto-Pearson for the remainder of Monday.
MHI RJ Aviation, which acquired the CRJ series of aircraft and supporting operations from Bombardier in 2020, said it would fully co-operate with the investigation into the crash-landing.
The Canadian incident comes less than three weeks after a mid-air collision between an American Airlines regional jet and a US military Black Hawk helicopter killed 67 people as the commercial plane approached Reagan National Airport just outside Washington.
The American Airlines plane was a smaller member of the CRJ aircraft stable.
US federal investigators on Friday said that the Black Hawk cockpit might have been receiving “bad data”, meaning the crew could have been looking at inaccurate altitude readings. It is also possible the pilots in the helicopter, who were on a night vision goggle test flight, may not have heard critical instructions from air traffic control.
President Donald Trump blamed Democrats and diversity, equity and inclusion policies for the Washington collision.