Mark Stephens, a retired pilot, walks us through how a Delta Airlines plane crash landed and flipped in Toronto but everyone on-board survived.
Category
๐ค
TechTranscript
00:00As you watch that airplane flip upside down, most people think that it would
00:05cause major fatalities. Everybody was doing their job, meaning flight attendants
00:09and pilots. Everybody followed their instructions. That's the reason we have
00:11nobody hurt or killed. My name is Mark Stevens. I'm a retired Delta captain. I
00:16spent 32 years in the airline industry. I have watched the video and done it
00:21second by second. The aircraft is coming in for landing. It looks like the pilots
00:26have put in the proper controls for the crosswind. The right main is a little
00:31lower than the left and that's how it should be because it should be wing down
00:34top rudder. As they put those controls in, the aircraft goes into a little bit of a
00:38slip, which means they need to add a little extra power and they have to pull
00:41back a little more on the stick. As it touches down, everything looks normal
00:45until the right main, right after touchdown, basically fails. I can't tell
00:50from the video if the right tire failed first, if there was something that struck
00:53on the runway. When the wing strikes the runway and tears itself open, that's when
00:58you see the immediate fire and that's the fuel because both wings carry fuel.
01:02Now, the other wing, it's still flying. So as it continues down the runway, that wing
01:07flies all the way around to the other side, which means the tail gets ripped
01:11off as it goes through it. That's how the aircraft ends up upside down because the
01:15left wing is always flying. The good news is where that wing struck and started
01:20pouring fuel out, the airplane continued to skid and leave the fireball behind.
01:25Had they stopped abruptly, they would have been in the fireball. I don't see a
01:28pilot error in this. When I first started flying, I would always ask the tower
01:32what the winds are. And one of my old captains said to me, you know more about
01:35the wind than he does. And that's the truth because as they're flying down,
01:39whatever the winds are that they're currently in, that's what they're
01:42correcting for. It doesn't matter what the tower is called. It's like a video game
01:46that kids play. But when you're a pilot, you're actually in the real world
01:51feeling it and seeing it. From what I saw, maybe he needed a little more flair. But
01:56if he struck something on the runway, which Toronto's runways are absolutely
01:59some of the best I've ever landed on, it could have been as easy as a block of
02:03ice. You're landing at 150, 140 miles an hour. And then within a second,
02:08the wing is on the ground, it's in a fire, it's rolling upside down, and it's
02:11sliding. It's an amazing event that happened probably in the blink of an eye
02:15for the guys flying the airplane. And all of these pilots trained for this,
02:18and it's still way safer than trying to drive in those kinds of conditions. If
02:24you evacuate airplanes with 300 people on a great big airplane, you'll get
02:28somebody hurt going down a slide because of the age differences. This airplane,
02:33they just had to walk out. They may have been really shook up. It'll be an
02:36emotional adventure from this point on. The structure of the aircraft, the tube,
02:41it remained intact. And that's a real big key. I would guess that everybody had
02:44their seatbelts on. If you take a methodical approach to exiting the
02:49airplane, follow their flight attendant's instructions, and that's how they
02:51survived. The airline industry will get safer because of this. Years ago, there
02:56was a Dallas crash that was really difficult to fly through, and they put it
02:59in the simulators. And every year, year and a half, we would do that wind shear
03:03event that the pilots that crashed did in the 80s. That's what will happen with
03:08this too.