ATLANTA — As the investigation into what caused a Delta jet to crash and flip upon landing at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, one the factors may well be the weather at the time of the crash.
Severe Weather Team 2 Chief Meteorologist Brad Nitz showed there was snow in the area, but wasn’t snowing in Toronto at the time of the crash.
“Toronto and the airport got about 8 inches of snow over the weekend,” Nitz said. “And the wind is strong, gusting to around 40 mph at the time of the crash.”
During a news conference Monday night, the airport CEO said she was grateful no one was injured.
“We are very grateful there was no loss of life and relatively minor injuries,” Deborah Flint, CEO of Greater Toronto Airports Authority, said.
Video from the scene shows the Mitsubishi CRJ-900LR upside down on the snowy tarmac as emergency workers hose it down. The plane was somewhat obscured by snow from a winter storm that hit Toronto over the weekend.
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“It’s very rare to see something like this,” said John Cox, CEO of aviation safety consulting firm Safety Operating Systems in St. Petersburg, Florida. “We’ve seen a couple of cases of takeoffs where airplanes have ended up inverted, but it’s pretty rare.”
Cox, who flew for U.S. Air for 25 years and has worked on NTSB investigations, said the CRJ-900 aircraft is a proven aircraft that’s been in service for decades and does a good job of handling inclement weather.
“The weather conditions were windy. The wind was out of the west at 27 to 35 knots, which is about 38 miles an hour. So it was windy. But the airplanes are designed and certified to handle that. The pilots are trained and experienced to handle that.”
Among the questions that need to be answered, Cox said, was why plane was missing a right wing.
“If one wing is missing, it’s going to have a tendency to roll over,” he said. “Those are going to be central questions as to what happened to the wing and the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. They will be found, if not today, tomorrow, and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada will read them out and they will have a very good understanding of what actually occurred here.”
The last major crash at Pearson was in Aug. 2, 2005, when an Airbus A340 landing from Paris skidded off the runway and burst into flames amid stormy weather. All 309 passengers and crew aboard Air France Flight 358 survived the crash.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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