Why Everybody Survived the Toronto Plane Crash

'The sheer survivability of this is really amazing'
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 18, 2025 7:44 PM CST
Why Everybody Survived the Toronto Plane Crash
A Delta Air Lines plane lies upside down at Toronto Pearson Airport on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025.   (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP)

Aviation experts—and passengers—are amazed that nobody was killed in the fiery crash of a Delta Air Lines plane at Toronto's Pearson Airport on Monday. At least 21 of the 80 people on board were injured when the plane crashed and flipped over, but all but two had been released from hospitals by Tuesday afternoon. Experts credit numerous safety features and design improvements for the lack of deaths in a crash that initially appeared catastrophic.

  • Seats "designed to absorb punishment." "The sheer survivability of this is really amazing," pilot and journalist Dan Ronan tells the BBC. The Mitsubishi CRJ-900's seats, he says, were "designed to absorb a great deal of punishment." Regulations, he says, keep "the seat in place and bolted to the floor, so you have a higher degree of survivability in your seat itself and you have less likelihood that the seat is going to become detached, where you're now strapped into a moving object that's being bounced around the cabin."

  • "Years of civil aviation research." "That was absolutely phenomenal that you could see an aircraft on its back like that and have people walking away from it," Michael McCormick, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, tells CNN. His second thought, he says, was, "Well that's the design. That's engineering. That's the years of civil aviation research." One big factor in survival, he says, is how the fuel-laden right wing broke off as the rest of the plane kept skidding, sparing passengers from a potential explosion and inferno.
  • Seatbelts. Graham Braithwaite, a professor of safety and accident investigation at the UK's Cranfield University, says aircraft interiors are designed to prevent injuries during crashes."Even the design of the seat back or the tray table is all part of how we consider making that survivable space," he tells the BBC. "And the seatbelt that people have is so important—that is the ultimate thing that stops people being thrown around the cabin like this."

  • Passengers and crew. Passengers have praised the efforts of crew members, and other passengers, to make sure people got off the crashed aircraft safely. Passenger Peter Carlson, who helped a woman and child get off the plane, tells the CBC that in a "blink," he found himself upside down and still strapped in. "What I saw was everyone on that plane suddenly became very close, in terms of how to help one another, how to console one another," he says. "That was powerful, but there was definite: 'What now? Who is leading? How do we find ourselves away from this?'" Another passenger shared video of his exit from the plane.
  • Investigation. The AP reports that Canadian investigators, assisted by a team from the US, will look at factors including weather conditions and possible human error or aircraft malfunction. "It appears from the video that the plane landed so hard that the right main gear collapsed. The tail and right wing began skidding causing the plane to roll over to the right," says Ella Atkins, the head of Virginia Tech's aerospace and ocean engineering department.
(More plane crash stories.)

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