> From inside we didn't see any of the fire, thank goodness! We were all upside down to start with, but many of us were able to release themselves pretty quickly. After that the "upright" of us helped the upside-down until we were all righted and ready to evacuate. We were able to quickly get out the one emergency exit that was safe, the other one poured jet fuel in when they opened it.
My brother in law, aviation firefighter, said after a crash you have 15s to egress, that's it. There's not a lot of air in the metal tube you're trapped in, it'll fill with smoke and everyone will be disoriented. It's also a long way to the exits, and the average person in the exit row probably will be in shock and likely not operate the exit door immediately.
Absolutely incredible the fireball was put out in the flip, these people are so lucky.
The standard time for evacuating an aircraft that has to be demonstrated for certification purposes is 90 seconds with only half of the exits usable. It generally helps that the fire is (at least initially) outside the cabin most of the time. But yes, I wouldn't bet on conditions in the plane staying survivable for 90 seconds in all cases.
I think they do, there was a bunch of footage of the AA collision it just took a little while for it to surface online. People publishing to social media is faster than an investigation
Holy shit, that was just pure luck that no one end up dead. Based on the video, the plane glide-flipped just enough to slide/roll itself out of the major fire. Things could be a whole lot worse if it played out just slightly differently.
It’s not a procedure but not against the rules assuming his parking brake was on. It would be similar to you taking notes in a personal notebook that you keep as a development journal.
Probably just because pilots generally think planes are cool, especially when landing, and there's not much else to do while waiting in line but film them.
Lots of pilots know each other and will sometimes film each other's landings just for fun. The original idea was probably along the lines of "Bill's coming in and I have a good angle on it, let's take a video and send it to him." Landing is the hardest part of piloting an airplane and many pilots take pride in their ability to land smoothly.
Slight tangent, if you are on an airplane that lands smoothly despite bad weather and crosswinds, compliment the pilot as you leave the plane. I once offered a "That was a damned impressive landing in this wind" on my way off an airplane and the pilot simply beamed with pride.
Extremely lucky, probably not. More in the sense "under different circumstances, this would have gone into the folder Uninteresting Landings, never to be viewed again." Ubiquitous smartphones mean petabytes upon petabytes of boring photos and videos - the "unusual" part is just in the event itself.
I think most pilots could take one look at that approach and see they were coming in too fast. As many have said, that looked more like a carrier landing than an airstrip approach.
Because of the tricky conditions and great view. Presumably they were waiting for that arrival and it’s not every day you get that view of crosswind landings into such a snowy airport.
The consensus on r/aviation seems to be that it was caused by wind shear.
> This looks like wind shear to me. It was a stable approach and then it suddenly got slammed into the ground. That doesn't look like pilot-induced change in descent rate, it is too sudden for that. A sudden change in wind direction (shear) when that slow can absolutely cause a sudden loss of lift.
> We have had almost 2 feet of snow up here since Friday, and are experiencing wind gusts up to 65 mph. Has basically been a winter hurricane.
> This is a CRJ landing on Runway 23 at YYZ. It is an 11,000’ runway. Winds at the time where gusting from the NE likely north of 30 knots, so this was a cross wind landing. My bet is that it wasn’t the worst situation that any of the pilots had been in. Delta is a pretty good company. Guessing (as a GA pilot and talking to pilots of bigger birds than this —- I know a few). Likely wind shear or wake turbulence. The wake turbulence part would be a reach considering the cross wind component would have blown it away by the time of this landing.
Interestingly, I found a deck of studying cards from Endeavor-Air, for the CRJ 900 limiations [1]. Card 18 states:
Max allowable crosswind component for takeoff and landing on a runway when the braking action is “FAIR” => 20 knots
That also seems to overlap with what is being discussed by CRJ pilots in this reddit thread [2] (EDIT: also discussed today here [3])
If the METAR is correct, they were landing with a crosswind of 28 knots, gusting to 35, on what doesn't look like a "dry" runway. So they might have been over their operational limits here.
The METAR was 27028G35KT, or 28 gusting 35 from 270° magnetic
However the runway landing was 33, or 330° magnetic.
So this is 24-30kt crosswind component. The maximum landing crosswind on a dry runway is 32kt. The press conference reported the runway as dry, so if they’re correct then it’s within limits. At the reported -9°c if the runway has been de-iced it could be dry I guess?
The surveillance potato camera makes it look like a hard landing on the right main, which is mounted on the wing root. But it’s very low quality and we’re not going to get the first real answers for a month.
Wake turbulence almost killed someone I knew flying a training jet. He landed after a heavy aircraft and the cross wind was just enough to counter the natural spreading of wake turbulence. There was basically a horizontal tornado over the runway. When he hit it he lost all roll control. He ended up ejecting horizontally across the grass and somehow survived.
I fly a lot and the only time I've ever thought 'this is it' was one time taking off out of Denver International. The airport is out on the plains east of the city and is known for high winds. We were taking off and nose had just started to lift up when a wind gust cause the entire plane to roll to the left. I could see the wing out my window and am still surprised to this day it didn't touch the ground. The pilot corrected, it felt like, by increasing our angle up and we finished taking off sliding a bit sideways.
They are landing on runway 23, with, from the METAR, wind coming from 270 at 28 knots. That's more than enough crosswind to clear any wake turbulence that could have been there. (See [1])
I've been flipped slideways flying short final (cessna) by a heavy jet that departed 90 seconds prior on a parallel runway. Fortunately I was high enough to recover, but it could have gone very differently.
Wind shear seems more likely this close to the ground, but I'm sure we'll get a nice write-up after the investigation.
experienced a windshear once in malaysia. only feet from the ground during landing. thankfully the pilots kept control and there were only a few bumps and bloody noses as a result (we slammed super hard into the tarmac, could feel.the moment of freefall clearly). this stuff is absolutely terrifying. i can imagine its a moment of total loss of control for a pilot, and having to basically on instinct regain it in milliseconds o.O. crazy stuff.
Watching the video it doesn't look like there was any flaring as you see right above the runway when landing. The approach seemed pretty stable to me and it just slammed into the runway. Some comments on that thread also noted lack of flaring.
I live nearby the airport and can attest to just how intense the wind was yesterday. I think the idea of a gust makes more sense though, as planes are certainly designed and operated to handle strong winds.
I stitched together a small audio clip from LiveATC with both the Ground and Tower frequencies mapped to the Left and Right audio channels. It starts around the time the aircraft was cleared to land, and then skips forward to the moment the controllers realized the aircraft crashed.
Here is a link to the .mp3 file (it's on Discord for now - I don't know if this is allowed, let me know if it isn't):
Rehosted so it'll stay alive at least a few years: <https://lucgommans.nl/tmp/YYZ_Crash.mp3>. Let me know if you'd like something more permanent than my tmp dump folder, or a filename that gives credits or so! (BTW if you're editing clips, I can recommend exporting to Opus instead of ancient MP3: released in ~2012 so support is very good by now and it's like twice the quality at the same file size, probably even better for speech)
Hey, thank you so much. I shared the Discord file because I was sharing it with some friends, and then thought HN might be interested, but I don't have a more convenient place to serve the file at the moment. Thank you for hosting it.
Good point about exporting to Opus! I used .mp3 because the original audio files were also in .mp3. I've re-exported the file in Opus now, let me know what would be the best way to send it to you.
As for file name and credits, I think it's probably best to credit LiveATC (https://www.liveatc.net/), since that's where I got the original audio and I didn't really do much else beyond separating the channels. The specific files I used are the YYZ Ground and YYZ Tower recordings from February 17th that start at 1900z.
It'll sort of die, you can't access them directly but if you take the link and paste it into discord (like one with just yourself) then it'll still work.
That's incredible. The plane literally turned over and burnt but no casualty. The flight staff must have done as amazing job keeping everyone calm and helped everyone get out of the upside, burning plane.
Compare this crash to the Emirates crash in Dubai (EK 521, 2016). In the Emirates incident, the passengers stalled the evacuation in order to grab their carry-ons. Many were seen on the tarmac dragging roll-aboards. Here the passengers chose life over property and efficiently evacuated the aircraft.
I know they need to control any possibility of a fire but man would it be a rude awakening to escape a significant plane crash, release your seatbelt while hanging upside down, make it to the exit door and then get sprayed in the face with cold water on a February day in Toronto.
One of the two ejected rear passengers in Asiana 214 (neither of which were wearing their seat belt) was unlucky enough to have initially survived, only to be doused in firefighting foam and then run over.
There is a longer version that shows the inside of the plane. The flight attendant decisively and composedly ushering the passengers off the (upside down) plane. Hats off.
I have a lot of antipathy towards the passengers who are getting out with their backpacks; if one takes the time to pick up their stuff they are probably in the way, take more time getting out, and could cause the death of other passengers or staff.
Flight Attendants are very well trained and, importantly, practiced at running evacuations. They run drills a couple days a year. They are tested to be able to empty a plane in 90 seconds.
If you want something to happen in an emergency, you either drill it to be instinct, or it won't happen reliably.
I've been looking for a video of the landing to see how it over turned, but haven't found one yet. I would have expected all airport runways to have multiple security cameras pointing at them t all times in this day and age.
I'm sure they do have video of the crash, but there's really no upside for them to release it. Eventually it'll come out, at the very least once the NTSB report is published.
Readit News
https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/1isabt...
Which also brings into mind cockpit distractions but its amazing they caught this on video.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1is5unz/i_was_on_the_f...
Just to emphasize how insanely lucky they were:
> From inside we didn't see any of the fire, thank goodness! We were all upside down to start with, but many of us were able to release themselves pretty quickly. After that the "upright" of us helped the upside-down until we were all righted and ready to evacuate. We were able to quickly get out the one emergency exit that was safe, the other one poured jet fuel in when they opened it.
welp guess i'm never flying again
Absolutely incredible the fireball was put out in the flip, these people are so lucky.
But still, that’s astonishing footage in the Reddit post linked above. Incredible that no one died.
If you're going to rip a wing off do it as early in the crash as possible so momentum will carry you past the fuel/fireball.
If fire develops when you've almost or completely stopped you are now involved in the fire and the fatality rate goes up dramatically.
No flare, hard landing, landing-gear collapse. Ouch.
I mean aircraft are fascinating and people film them all the time but wouldn’t expect a pilot sitting in another one to casually film landings.
Maybe just an extremely lucky catch.
Slight tangent, if you are on an airplane that lands smoothly despite bad weather and crosswinds, compliment the pilot as you leave the plane. I once offered a "That was a damned impressive landing in this wind" on my way off an airplane and the pilot simply beamed with pride.
> This looks like wind shear to me. It was a stable approach and then it suddenly got slammed into the ground. That doesn't look like pilot-induced change in descent rate, it is too sudden for that. A sudden change in wind direction (shear) when that slow can absolutely cause a sudden loss of lift.
> We have had almost 2 feet of snow up here since Friday, and are experiencing wind gusts up to 65 mph. Has basically been a winter hurricane.
> This is a CRJ landing on Runway 23 at YYZ. It is an 11,000’ runway. Winds at the time where gusting from the NE likely north of 30 knots, so this was a cross wind landing. My bet is that it wasn’t the worst situation that any of the pilots had been in. Delta is a pretty good company. Guessing (as a GA pilot and talking to pilots of bigger birds than this —- I know a few). Likely wind shear or wake turbulence. The wake turbulence part would be a reach considering the cross wind component would have blown it away by the time of this landing.
If the METAR is correct, they were landing with a crosswind of 28 knots, gusting to 35, on what doesn't look like a "dry" runway. So they might have been over their operational limits here.
[1] https://www.brainscape.com/flashcards/endeavor-air-crj-900-l...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/rf3oqc/landing_in...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/FlightDispatch/comments/1irubk0/cur...
However the runway landing was 33, or 330° magnetic.
So this is 24-30kt crosswind component. The maximum landing crosswind on a dry runway is 32kt. The press conference reported the runway as dry, so if they’re correct then it’s within limits. At the reported -9°c if the runway has been de-iced it could be dry I guess?
The surveillance potato camera makes it look like a hard landing on the right main, which is mounted on the wing root. But it’s very low quality and we’re not going to get the first real answers for a month.
They are landing on runway 23, with, from the METAR, wind coming from 270 at 28 knots. That's more than enough crosswind to clear any wake turbulence that could have been there. (See [1])
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225007139_Crosswind...
I've been flipped slideways flying short final (cessna) by a heavy jet that departed 90 seconds prior on a parallel runway. Fortunately I was high enough to recover, but it could have gone very differently.
Wind shear seems more likely this close to the ground, but I'm sure we'll get a nice write-up after the investigation.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cMC5lrE5Zek
Dead Comment
Here is a link to the .mp3 file (it's on Discord for now - I don't know if this is allowed, let me know if it isn't):
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/668315121772134401/13...
Good point about exporting to Opus! I used .mp3 because the original audio files were also in .mp3. I've re-exported the file in Opus now, let me know what would be the best way to send it to you.
As for file name and credits, I think it's probably best to credit LiveATC (https://www.liveatc.net/), since that's where I got the original audio and I didn't really do much else beyond separating the channels. The specific files I used are the YYZ Ground and YYZ Tower recordings from February 17th that start at 1900z.
See the comment above about hosting the file in a more permanent way.
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I'm more surprised the wing rupture didn't cause a fire/explosion because this is where most of the fuel is stored.
Unless you're a checked bag.
* Approach seems mostly unobjectionable (reasonable rate of descent, plausible looking approach speed)
* Runway not especially slick
* May have touched down short and left of centerline
Hope for a preliminary report from Canada Transportation Safety Board in a couple weeks.
Pilot Blog as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIhEIUrTLco
He suspects landing speed may have been too low, making it impossible to flare correctly.
(Both channels are former airline pilots.)
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=617972644350232
edit: apparently Canada banned PFAS in firefighting foam.
When it's your time to go ...
https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1iruc70/vid...
---
On a side note, it is crazy someone would take a selfie video before exiting a crashed airplane.
It's literally once in a lifetime, and it didn't look like anyone was in serious danger after they realised they'd survived.
https://x.com/rawsalerts/status/1891632984500904441/video/1
If you want something to happen in an emergency, you either drill it to be instinct, or it won't happen reliably.
Here's what the CRJ900 looks like intact: https://d3lcr32v2pp4l1.cloudfront.net/Pictures/780xany/0/8/3...
Tail and/or wing debris can be seen on the left side of this photo (forward of the aircraft nose): https://i.cbc.ca/1.7461358.1739833036!/cpImage/httpImage/ima...
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https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1is1qoy/video_of_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1is1qoy/video_of_...