Delta plane crashes while landing in Toronto

we begin with the breaking news that of Toronto where a Delta Airlines flight arriving from Minneapolis has crashed on Landing that's according to the FAA you're looking at live images from Toronto's Pearson Airport the jet appears to have flipped upside down it is a developing situation and a lot is unknown at this hour but here's what we do know the incident happened around 2:45 p.m. Eastern 80 people were on board the aircraft Pearson airport has said in a post on x that all passengers and All crew have been accounted for and emergency crews are responding

a local official tells MSNBC that nine people have been injured one is in critical condition and has been airlifted to a nearby Trauma Center a child was also injured and taken by ambulance to a local hospital this video shows passengers evacuating from the jet the flight is operated by a regional subsidiary of Delta Airlines called Endeavor Airlines the transport ation Safety Board of Canada is currently in charge of this investigation let's bring in my colleague MSNBC host Ali VY who also happens to be a pilot he's been tracking this story for us also joining us

NTSB investigator MSNBC Aviation analyst Jeff gazeti will join us momentarily Ali V I've been listening to you on the air with our friend and colleague Katie tur just reset for us what you believe to be the circumstances around this now flipped over upside down jet so this is a Delta feeder jet it's not a Mainline jet but Minneapolis as you know is one of the major centers for Delta Toronto is the major Hub in Canada uh it was on its way in it was completely full it's got 76 seats on that plane two uh two

people in the cockpit a pilot and a co-pilot and two crew so that was a full complement which is typical of planes coming into Toronto the issue is the weather in Toronto has been very bad it's had two back-to-back storms three plus feet of snow on the ground I mean I've had family since me pictures for the last several days of just snow which Canadians don't do because they're used to snow plane came in the landing speed's about 150 M an hour so think about that plane seems to get to the ground at 150 mil

an hour now if it flips over at 150 mil an hour it probably wouldn't look the way it looks right now it would probably be destroyed so something happened the pilots figured out something the plane then seems to have flipped over now what we don't see is landing gear so we don't know whether the landing gear failed the landing gear broke the landing gear wasn't uh open or could it be that the winds were very high the plane could have caught some wind as it was Landing uh the snow the banks along the runways the

runways have been cleared but the banks along the runways have a lot of snow so that sometimes happens you hit some snow and then you go over or snow blows onto the runway and becomes Ice uh the plane gets uh to the ground most people get off there are nine injured some of those injuries are supposedly to do with the weather because it's it's -4 degrees fah and in Toronto but the the two who have been sent to hospital one is a child by land ambulance there are very very good uh Children's Hospitals uh in

Toronto it's a Children's Hospital Center really for Canada the other one was medac to a Trauma Center again that's because Toronto is a very heavily trafficed City it's got excellent trauma hospitals but it would be more standard to put somebody on a helicopter and in five minutes be at a a Trauma Center so that's what we're looking at right now we are told that the critical injury is not life-threatening which is great news if true uh but amazing to look at these pictures to see an upside down plane on a Runway a jet um and

and and understand that maybe nine people are injured and we're hoping it's not more than that a lot of questions the airports closed right now there were winds gusting up to 27 miles hour which would be entirely manageable for a crj900 like that that would not be winds uh that would necessarily cause it to to to flip and the kinds of planes I flew if you had 27 m per hour gust you just I wouldn't fly uh but that's not in itself the danger whether the wind caught it and the wing caught some snow or

there was ice on the runway might have been it might be in concert with other things uh that the wind was a factor but the weather is definitely a factor there there's a lot of snow to the extent that even the city of Toronto has said it might take weeks to get that City cleared of the snow that it's got right now so the weather's probably the most likely Factor at the moment Ali do we know if there were cancellations in and out of the airport at the time of this incident I I don't know

yet and I I I know this plane was coming in a little bit late and it it showed as delayed um typically when there is the kind of weather you've got in Toronto like this you see departure delays because they're deicing all the planes when it's that cold they have to De the planes you'll see an airport it's like an Airfield it's like a big much bigger than a football field just full of planes waiting to take off so you often have departure delays we we did not know of any any incoming delays I've seen

some questions raised on social media about should the airport have even been open it's important to remember this is Canada's biggest airport it's a major Hub not just for Canada but for international flights and for American flights so pressure on airports to stay open uh tends to be high whether that's a good thing or a bad thing airports tend not to to close even after DCA after that plane crash at Reagan National remember one of the first things they announced that they'll be open at 11 o'clock the next morning so uh the airport is now

closed by the way U it's fully closed because they need to investigate and they need to make sure that if it was weather or wind uh or they surmised that it might be these investigations take a long time they want to make sure this doesn't happen twice U so I don't know that there were delays coming in I know there were delays getting out Jeff gazet joins us as well Jeff um just pick up where Ally has left off about what questions you have as an investigator uh well it really is striking to me that

uh we have yet another major airline event and this one appears to be very serious because it's it's lying upside down without its wings so you know something very traumatic must have happened and it is uh really a miracle that there were no fatalities uh fingers crossed on the the critically injured person we hope uh uh we hope these serious injuries will will clear up in time but uh uh right now Nicole it's really just we just have too many questions and not enough answers we have an airplane that experienced some sort of trauma during

landing and to the point where it's uh entire Wing box ripped off and the fuselage continued and came to rest upside down there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of thermal damage or fire damage which is a miracle because those wings hold fuel and fortunately they didn't they didn't blow it seems um so uh it's just it's a miracle with regard to the survivability design of the aircraft too the uh the the 16g seats that that are designed not to move in a crash like this the seat belts uh so it's uh but it's

still very troubling um the wind was very high as Captain Cox indicated and that may have played a role in this but it could have been a compounding factor with something else perhaps an engine issue or a flight control issue we just don't know right now Jeff um we're we're hearing that there are now 15 people with injuries but to your point quite miraculous to look at this image and and report that the injuries um AR more plentiful when there were 80 people on board I just want to ask you in terms of what you

can see what we can all see this image on our screen if you've ever seen this before yes I've seen uh numerous accidents uh some involving smaller business Jets uh others involving larger transport category airplanes uh for example you had the uh Asiana 777 landing at San Francisco about uh oh must have been 10 12 years ago where the uh uh that airplane coming into San Francisco hit the seaw wall and began to Tumble and ended up upside down but it's wings were attached uh here we don't see that uh I recently investigated an accident

involving a uh a bombardier uh type of airplane where it uh left the runway for uh suspicious reasons perhaps uh uh a crosswind perhaps a nose landing gear steering problem upon touchdown that could cause an airplane to come off the Runway strike something and flip over but uh it really until we see video and I'm sure there is video uh of this airplane making its approach we really don't know the the sequence of events here yet alii just jump in on on how striking it is to um be covering another uh potentially even more catastrophic

Airline incident I mean this one certainly looks catastrophic that that's the the amazing part of it to look at this what the pictures that we're looking at and and and not know that anyone has perished in this um again I want to remind everybody this is this is the Bombardier the crj900 is made by Bombardier Bombardier now made by Mitsubishi but it used to be a Canadian company this plane was made in Canada um they are they're generally speaking very safe planes unto themselves and they are you know planes passenger planes are meant to think

about crashes however the plane went over uh one of the first images you saw was fire trucks moving in because the the fuel is in the wings and when you crash a plane if you're in a plane one of the first things you think about is if that plane were to crash how do you not make it also be a fire because if anybody survives it the thing that can really uh get you is the fire so you see that's being sprayed with foam it was being sprayed by with foam as passengers were getting off

uh Canada has had Toronto has had a major crash many many years ago it was an Air France flight everybody got off of that as well by the way that was remarkable the crew did an amazing job the flight attendants got everybody off in a calm and safe fashion um so Toronto has a great deal of experience with with running a safe airport they were on it very fast but one of these things is once that plane's upside down you don't know what's going on this plane came in at 150 mph that's roughly the speed

at which a plane has to land now when there are gusting winds the pilot upon Landing that plane in the seconds before they land they've got to play with that that throttle and that power and their and their steering in their rudders to keep it on track and sometimes you have to add power and sometimes you have to take power away it's it's really the most complicated part of flight people don't think about it it's a part where you're on your phone you told people you're landed you you you you're undoing your seat belt it

is the most complicated part of flight and so I I we're going to learn a lot because the crew seems to be alive um and I'm hoping this is the case I'm hoping everybody's alive we're going to learn a lot about what happened and there will be real lessons from this one the question remains as to whether that airport should have been open closed with gusting winds and 2 to 3 feet of snow without uh without uh shoveling that snow without without uh moving the snow out of the way which means the banks of the

runways may have had more snow than they should have so what happened with the wings it's hard to tell was that because the wings clipped some snow was that in the turnover of the airplane uh we need to understand what the landing gear is but as your other guest said these are all compounding factors in many cases when you're dealing with weather WEA is every Pilot's enemy because it's unpredictable it changes it changes frequently and as a pilot you've got to make decisions that's not a control tower telling you as you're coming in they give

you the weather readout you have to fly your plane to the ground so the idea that this plane touch down at something like 150 miles per hour and flipped over and we have survivors given that image you're seeing is is incredible because that's a that's a serious crash for