Passengers were hanging upside down “like bats” after a Delta flight from Minneapolis crashed into the runway at Toronto’s Pearson airport Monday afternoon.
All of the 80 passengers and crew survived the fiery crash that sent emergency crews scrambling to extinguish flames from the overturned jet.
Pro skier Peter Koukov told CNN he “didn’t know anything was the matter” until the Bombardier CRJ900 hit the ground and felt like it turned sideways.
When the plane stopped moving, “we were upside down hanging like bats,” Koukov, who is from Colorado, reportedly said.
He got his seatbelt unbuckled and managed to stand up on the ceiling of the plane.
Koukov told NBC News that the flight attendants got people off the plane “in a pretty orderly fashion.”
Passenger John Nelson said he was hanging upside down like all the other passengers once the plane came to a stop. “We tried to get out of there as quickly as possible,” he told CNN.
He described a scene of “mass chaos” after the crash landing.
“A lady next to me was upside down, we kind of let ourselves go and fell to hit the ceiling, which was a surreal feeling, and then everybody was just like, ‘Get out, get out, get out.’ We could smell jet fuel,” Nelson reportedly said.
Nelson told ABC News there was no warning before the crash.
The aircraft hit the ground hard, then popped into the air again before leaning left, he said. “It was just incredibly fast. There was a giant firewall down the side. I could actually feel the heat through the glass,” Nelson told ABC. “Then we were going sideways. I’m not even sure how many times we tumbled, but we ended upside down.”
When the plane came to a stop, everyone got suddenly quiet, he said.
“You heard the flight attendants yelling, ‘Open the door. Everybody, take your stuff and get out now,’” he recounted. “We all worked together and got out of there as quickly as we could.”
Firefighters were dousing the plane — operated by Endeavor Air, a regional airline for Delta — with foamy fire retardant.
Evacuees were able to jump out of the plane’s exit doors holding their jackets and small bags. Koukov heard an explosion on exiting the plane, but “luckily the firefighters got out of there.”
Peter Carlson, another passenger, described the sound of the crash as “cement and metal.”
The paramedic from Minneapolis told CBC that passengers helped each other after the crash. “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,” Carlson told the public broadcaster.
Carlson told CBS News he smelled aviation fuel and saw it streaming down the windows of the plane.
But he and another man took the time to free a mother and her young son. “My fatherly instinct and background as a paramedic kind of kicked in,” he said.
People were helping each other out of harm’s way, he told CBC. “The most powerful part of today was there were just people – no countries, no nothing. It was just people together helping each other.”