Retired pilot explains how everyone survived the Toronto crash

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Mark Stephens, a retired pilot, walks us through how a Delta Airlines plane crash landed and flipped in Toronto but everyone on-board survived.

Transcript

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.

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