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TORONTO: A Delta Air Lines regional jet flipped upside down upon landing at Canada’s Toronto Pearson Airport on Monday amid windy weather following a snowstorm, injuring 18 of the 80 people on board, officials said.

Three people on flight DL4819 from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport suffered critical injuries, among them a child, a Canadian air ambulance official said, with 15 others also immediately taken to hospitals.

Some of the injured have since been released, Delta said late on Monday.

The US carrier said a CRJ900 aircraft operated by its Endeavor Air subsidiary was involved in a single-aircraft accident with 76 passengers and four crew members on board.

The 16-year-old CRJ900, made by Canada’s Bombardier and powered by GE Aerospace engines, can seat up to 90 people. At least one of the two wings was no longer attached to the plane, video showed after the accident.

Canadian authorities said they would investigate the cause of the crash, which was not yet known.

Passenger John Nelson posted a video of the aftermath on Facebook, showing a fire engine spraying water on the plane that was lying belly-up on the snow-covered tarmac.

He later told CNN there was no indication of anything unusual before landing.

“We hit the ground, and we were sideways, and then we were upside down,” Nelson told the television network.

“I was able to just unbuckle and sort of fall and push myself to the ground. And then some people were kind of hanging and needed some help being helped down, and others were able to get down on their own,” he said.

Weather conditions

Toronto Pearson Airport said earlier on Monday it was dealing with high winds and frigid temperatures as airlines attempted to catch up with missed flights after a weekend snowstorm dumped more than 22 cm (8.6 inches) of snow at the airport.

The Delta plane touched down in Toronto at 2:13 p.m. (1913 GMT) after an 86-minute flight and came to rest near the intersection of runway 23 and runway 15, FlightRadar24 data showed.

The reported weather conditions at time of the crash indicated a “gusting crosswind and blowing snow,” the flight tracking website said.

Toronto Pearson Fire Chief Todd Aitken said late on Monday the runway was dry and there were no crosswind conditions, but several pilots Reuters spoke to who had seen videos of the incident pushed back against this comment.

US aviation safety expert and pilot John Cox said there was an average crosswind of 19 knots (22 mph) from the right as it was landing, but he noted this was an average, and gusts would go up and down.

“It’s gusty so they are constantly going to have to be making adjustments in the air speed, adjustments in the vertical profile and adjustments in the lateral profile,” he said of the pilots, adding that “it’s normal for what professional pilots do.”

Investigators would try to figure out why the right wing separated from the plane, Cox said.

Michael J. McCormick, associate professor of air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the upside-down position made the Toronto crash fairly unique.

“But the fact that 80 people survived an event like this is a testament to the engineering and the technology, the regulatory background that would go into creating a system where somebody can actually survive something that not too long ago would have been fatal,” he said.

Three previous cases of planes flipping over on landing involved McDonnell Douglas’s MD-11 model. In 2009, a FedEx freighter turned over on landing at Tokyo’s Narita airport killing both pilots. In 1999, a China Airlines flight inverted at Hong Kong, killing three of 315 occupants. In 1997, another FedEx freighter flipped over at Newark with no fatalities.

Airport delays

Flights have resumed at Toronto Pearson, but airport president Deborah Flint said on Monday evening there would be some operational impact and delays over the next few days while two runways remained closed for the investigation.

She attributed the absence of fatalities in part to the work of first responders at the airport.

“We are very grateful that there is no loss of life and relatively minor injuries,” she said at a press conference.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) said it was deploying a team of investigators, and the US National Transportation Safety Board said a team of investigators would assist Canada’s TSB.

Global aviation standards require a preliminary investigation report to be published within 30 days of an accident.

Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which closed a deal to buy the CRJ aircraft program from Bombardier in 2020, said it was aware of the incident and would fully cooperate with the investigation.

The crash in Canada followed other recent crashes in North America. An Army helicopter collided with a CRJ-700 passenger jet in Washington, D.C., killing 67 people, while at least seven people died when a medical transport plane crashed in Philadelphia and 10 were killed in a passenger plane crash in Alaska.

In Fresno, California, social media rumors about impending immigration raids at the city’s schools left some parents panicking — even though the raids were all hoaxes. In Denver, a real immigration raid at an apartment complex led to scores of students staying home from school, according to a lawsuit. And in Alice, Texas, a school official incorrectly told parents that Border Patrol agents might board school buses to check immigration papers.
President Donald Trump’s immigration policies already are affecting schools across the country, as officials find themselves responding to rising anxiety among parents and their children, including those who are here legally. Trump’s executive actions vastly expanded who is eligible for deportation and lifted a ban on immigration enforcement in schools.
While many public and school officials have been working to encourage immigrants to send their children to school, some have done the opposite. Meanwhile, Republicans in Oklahoma and Tennessee have put forward proposals that would make it difficult — or even impossible — for children in the country illegally and US-born children of parents without documentation to attend school at all.
As they weigh the risks, many families have struggled with separating facts from rumor.
In the Alice Independent School District in Texas, school officials told parents that the district “received information” that US Border Patrol agents could ask students about their citizenship status during field trips on school buses that pass through checkpoints about 60 miles from the Texas-Mexico border. The information ended up being false.
Angelib Hernandez of Aurora, Colorado, began keeping her children home from their schools a few days a week after Trump’s inauguration. Now she doesn’t send them at all.
She’s worried immigration agents will visit her children’s schools, detain them and separate her family.
“They’ve told me, ‘Hopefully we won’t ever be detained by ourselves,’” she said. “That would terrify them.”
Hernandez and her children arrived about a year ago and applied for asylum. She was working through the proper legal channels to remain in the US, but changes in immigration policies have made her status tenuous.
In the past week, her fears have intensified. Now, she says, her perception is “everyone” — from Spanish-language media to social media to other students and parents — is giving the impression that immigration agents plan to enter Denver-area schools. The school tells parents that kids are safe. “But we don’t trust it.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are not known to have entered schools anywhere. But the possibility has alarmed families enough that some districts are pushing for a change in the policy allowing agents to operate in schools.
Denver Public Schools last week sued the Department of Homeland Security, accusing the Trump administration of interfering with the education of young people in its care. Denver took in 43,000 migrants from the southern border last year, including children who ended up in the city’s public schools. Attendance at schools where migrant kids are concentrated has fallen in recent weeks, the district said in the lawsuit, saying the immigration raid at a local apartment complex was a factor.
The support Denver schools have given to students and families to help through the uncertainty involves “tasks that distract and divert resources from DPS’s core and essential educational mission,” lawyers for the district said in the lawsuit.
Around the country, conservatives have been questioning whether immigrants without legal status should even have the right to a public education.
Oklahoma’s Republican state superintendent, Ryan Walters, pushed a rule that would have required parents to show proof of citizenship — a birth certificate or passport — to enroll their children in school. The rule would have allowed parents to register their children even if they could not provide proof, but advocates say it would have strongly discouraged them from doing so. Even the state’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, thought the rule went too far — and vetoed it.
In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers have put forward a bill that would allow school districts to decide whether to admit students without papers. They say they hope to invite legal challenges, which would give them a chance to overturn a four-decade-old precedent protecting the right of every child in the country to get an education
The implications of immigration policy for US schools are enormous. Fwd.us, a group advocating for criminal justice and immigration reform, estimated in 2021 that 600,000 K-12 students in the US lacked legal status. Nearly 4 million students — many of them born in the US — have a parent living in the country illegally.
Immigration raids have been shown to impact academic performance for students — even those who are native-born. In North Carolina and California, researchers have found lower attendance and a drop in enrollment among Hispanic students when local police participate in a program that deputizes them to enforce immigration law. Another study found test scores of Hispanic students dropped in schools near the sites of workplace raids.
In Fresno, attendance has dropped since Trump took office by anywhere from 700 to 1,000 students a day. Officials in the central California district have received countless panicked calls from parents about rumored immigration raids – including about raids at schools, said Carlos Castillo, chief of diversity, equity and inclusion at the Fresno Unified School District. The feared school raids have all been hoaxes.
“It goes beyond just the students who … have citizenship status or legal status,” Castillo said. Students are afraid for their parents, relatives and friends, and they’re terrified that immigration agents might raid their schools or homes, he said.
A school principal recently called Castillo in tears after a family reached out to say they were too afraid to go buy groceries. The principal went shopping for the family and delivered $100 in groceries to their home — and then sat with the family and cried, Castillo said.
The district has been working with families to inform them of their rights and advise them on things like liquidating assets or planning for the custody of children if the parents leave the US The district has partnered with local organizations that can give legal advice to families and has held almost a dozen meetings, including some on Zoom.