All passengers and crew on a flight which crashed and overturned while landing at Toronto Pearson Airport in Canada have survived, the airport’s chief executive has said.
“We are very grateful there was no loss of life and relatively minor injuries,” said Deborah Flint of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority.
One child and two adults were critically injured in the crash, according to emergency services and images shared on social media show a plane flipped over and lying on its roof on the snow-covered tarmac. It appears to be missing at least one of its wings.
Toronto Pearson Airport said the crash involved a Delta Air Lines flight arriving from Minneapolis, and of the 80 people on board, 76 were passengers and four were crew.
Eighteen passengers have been transported to hospital in total.
Ontario Air Ambulance Service Ornge said it had dispatched three air ambulance helicopters and two land ambulances to the scene.
The patients with critical injuries include a child, a man in his 60s and a woman in her 40s, it added.
Toronto Pearson Airport president and CEO, Deborah Flint, in an evening briefing, called the response by emergency personnel “textbook” and credited them with helping ensure no loss of life.
The US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) said the plane involved was Delta Air Lines Flight 4819, being operated by one of its subsidiaries, Endeavor Air.
Delta confirmed that a CRJ900 aircraft was involved in the incident at about 14:15 ET (19:15 GMT) on Monday afternoon.
Twenty-two of the passengers are Canadian, the rest are “multinational”, Ms Flint said.
The airport was closed shortly after the incident, but flights into and out of Toronto Pearson resumed at about 17:00 local time, the airport said.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) said it was deploying a team to “gather information and assess the occurrence”.
Two runways will remain closed for several days for investigation and passengers have been told to expect some delays.
Toronto Pearson fire chief Todd Aitken said on Monday night that it is early in the investigation but they can say “the runway was dry and there was no cross-wind conditions”.
That contradicts earlier reports of wind gusts over 40mph (64km/h) and a crosswind.
Video footage shared on social media shows people clambering out of the overturned aircraft, with fire crews spraying it with foam.
“We’re in Toronto, we just landed. Our plane crashed, it’s upside down,” said one man as he filmed a video taken from outside the upturned plane.
The video shows passengers being helped out of the plane’s doors by airport staff, with some then running away from the plane’s entrance.
“Most people appear to be OK. We’re all getting off, there’s some smoke going on,” he can be heard saying.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said provincial officials are in contact with the airport and local authorities and will provide any help that’s needed.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said he was “grateful to the first responders and professionals on the scene”.
After the crash, the airport’s arrival and departure boards showed scores of delays and cancellations to flights.
Some passengers told the BBC that they were now stuck in Toronto for several days after their flights were cancelled, with none available on Monday or Tuesday.
James and Andrea Turner were in customs – located right before the departure gates – when they were suddenly told to evacuate.
“They got rid of everybody from customs to security, and then put everybody back to the general area,” James said, adding that the departures hall was packed as a result.
The couple had been due to board the plane that crashed on the runway. Their flight was then cancelled – the third delay to their trip, after their previous journeys were rescheduled due to bad weather.
Toronto Pearson Airport had been experiencing weather-related delays over the last few days, with heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures battering parts of Ontario.
Two storms – one on Wednesday and one on Sunday – covered the city with a total of 30-50cm (11.8-19.6 inches) of snow.
The BBC’s US partner CBS reports that there was light snow falling at the time of the crash.
Earlier on Monday, the airport warned that “frigid temperatures and high winds were moving in”.
It said a “busy day” was expected, with airlines “catching up after this weekend’s snowstorm which dumped over 22cm of snow at the airport”.
The crash is at least the fourth major aviation incident in North America in the past month – including a deadly in-air collision between a passenger plane and a military helicopter near Washington DC’s Ronald Reagan airport, which killed all 67 people on board.
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