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All 80 people on board are expected to survive. Two described finding themselves upside down after what had seemed like a routine descent.
- Feb. 18, 2025, 1:21 a.m. ET
All 80 passengers and crew members on board the Delta Air Lines flight from Minneapolis that crashed and flipped over at Toronto’s airport are expected to survive.
Two passengers described what seemed like a routine descent that suddenly turned them upside-down.
Pete Koukov
Mr. Koukov, 28, a professional skier from Colorado, was on his way to Toronto to film a ski movie. Nothing seemed amiss during the final descent, he said in an interview, until the wheels hit the ground and the plane skidded on its right side.
From his window seat on the left side of the plane, Mr. Koukov said, he saw flames as the plane hit the ground. “I unbuckled pretty fast and kind of lowered myself to the floor, which was the ceiling,” he said. “People were panicking.”
The plane ended up belly side up. He shared footage on Instagram of the moment he and other passengers clambered across seats and out an emergency exit, onto a snow-streaked runway.
Pete Carlson
Mr. Carlson, a paramedic, was traveling to a conference in Toronto. Passengers were told that there had been strong winds, but he said the crash jolted him from what began as a routine descent.
“One minute you’re landing, kind of waiting to see your friends and your people. And the next minute you’re physically upside-down and just really turned around,” he told the CBC, the Canadian public broadcaster. “It was cement and metal.”
