A saying among pilots reportedly goes, "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing." By that criterion, the landing of Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Toronto on Monday afternoon, Feb. 17, was a good landing, at least for most of those on board who did in fact walk away under their own power. But those who watched the plane land and saw what it looked like afterwards might disagree.
Although the Toronto area had recently received as much as 20 inches of snow, airport officials report that the runway was clear when Flight 4819 began its approach to the Toronto airport, which is in the suburb of Mississauga. The main weather problem was wind, according to a report by CNN, which was gusting from 26 to 38 MPH at a 40-degree angle to the runway. Landing with even a steady crosswind is a tricky proposition, because the pilot relies on the wind and adjusts his (or her!) controls to keep the plane lined up with the direction of travel. But if the wind suddenly changes, or drops to nothing, as could conceivably happen, the pilot's carefully calculated orientation and velocity can change just as abruptly. And something like this evidently happened to the Bombardier CRJ900, which was carrying 76 passengers and four crew members at the time.
Normally, just before landing the pilot will "flare" the aircraft, tilting the nose up and slowing the descent until the landing gear contact the runway, ideally without the passengers even noticing they're now on the ground. That wasn't what happened in this case. Both reports of passengers on the plane and a video clip taken from a nearby plane show that the jetliner never flared, but hit the ground so hard that the rear (main) landing gear collapsed. Almost immediately the right wing hit the ground, sheared off, and a fire began where the missing wing exposed fuel.
Then a curious thing happened. The plane was still going so fast that the remaining left wing was producing plenty of lift. While sliding along the runway in flames, the plane executed a half barrel roll, turning completely upside-down, until the left wing hit the runway, ending this unique maneuver. As the fuselage finally slowed down and stopped, the fire did too, leaving 80 passengers and crew members "upside-down hanging like bats," according to one passenger.
Not everyone on board was a trained athlete, so getting down off the floor (now the roof) posed problems for several people and resulted in some 21 injuries. But by week's end, everyone was out of the hospital and in receipt of an offer of $30,000 from Delta for enduring what has to be one of the weirdest landings in aviation history.
Most news reports covering this story inevitably mention the previous air accidents that have happened since the New Year, and just to be perverse, I won't (you can find the other two big ones in my previous blogs). While this one had a happy ending for all concerned, it does make you wonder if something systematic is going on with regard to air safety.
Even with the accidents we've had already, though, flying is per mile one of the safest modes of travel, much safer than driving the same distance in your car. But psychology is not statistics, and my wife has already asked me with concern in her voice whether I'm going to drive or fly on a business trip I have scheduled later this month. The logical and more safe thing is to fly, but I understand her concern.
Officially, the investigation into this crash has just begun. I'm sure the pilots will be grilled thoroughly, and the black-box recordings pored over. We can imagine that there are two extremes of responsibility. On one extreme, the pilot simply messed up the landing, and the same thing might have happened even if it was a bright sunny day. On the other extreme, even the best pilot in the world couldn't have dealt successfully with the bizarre and unique wind turbulence that was encountered, and despite all the piloting skills available, the plane failed to flare, hit the runway too hard, and flipped over.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Weather remains a not-completely-predictable factor in aviation, despite technical advances such as CAT (clear-air turbulence) detection, wind-shear sensors around airports, and other instrumentation that can help pilots make safe landings, or decide to delay a landing if things are just too dicey.
That may have been the case here, but figuring out that the world's best pilot couldn't have landed in those particular conditions is not something we can presently do. You can imagine peppering every runway with tiny anemometers that would give some artificial-intelligence system second-by-second updates on the wind conditions, but most of the time it would just be wasted effort, and it might give bad advice anyway, telling the pilot it's okay to land when it wasn't and vice-versa. And circumstances can change so fast that the warning might come too late for the pilot to do anything about it.
I will keep my eyes on this investigation and when results are announced, I will try to do an update on what has to be one of the closest near-miss crashes on record, in terms of fatalities. The investigation should go pretty quickly as all the passengers and crew are around to tell us what they saw, the pilots survived, the black boxes survived, and we have a video of almost the whole thing. What may be missing are fine-grained data on wind conditions, but even that data may be recoverable from video cameras on site if some cleverness is exercised in that direction.
We can all be grateful that every person on that plane survived, even though the landing was more than anyone bargained for. I'm not sure whether I would take such a ride myself even if I knew there was $30,000 waiting for me on the other side. The payments to passengers are chicken feed compared to the loss to the airline represented by a functioning airliner that is now turned into scrap metal. But those payments bought the airline more than what they cost in good will.
Sources: I referred to an AP report carried by WHEC-TV in Rochester, NY at https://www.whec.com/national-world/plane-that-flipped-over-in-canada-highlights-some-of-the-dangers-of-holding-kids-on-your-lap/, a CNN report at https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/us/what-we-know-delta-plane-crash-canada/index.html,
and the Wikipedia article "Delta Connection Flight 4819."
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