A survivor of the Toronto plane crash said Tuesday there were “no warning” signs before their Delta jet burst into flames and flipped over, leaving them “hanging upside down like bats.”
“There was no warning from the pilot,” Peter Koukov told Fox News of the horrifying crash landing at Pearson Airport on Monday that miraculously did not kill any of the 80 onboard.
“There was no physical warning either — I didn’t feel like anything was wrong until the second the wheels touched the ground and it kind of went all mayhem from there,” he said.
“We hit the ground and kind of bounced up and turned on our side — we were sliding on our side for a while,” he said.
“And then we were hanging upside down like bats,” he separately told ABC News, saying it “all happened pretty, pretty fast.”
Koukov said he and the woman next to him were able to free themselves quickly from their seatbelts and right themselves on the floor — which at that point was the plane ceiling.
“Other people needed help and were falling,” he said — saying that to his knowledge, none of the injured passengers were “hurt by getting down from their seatbelts.”
Other passengers recorded videos of the topsy-turvy chaos, as stunned passengers struggled to grab their personal belongings while flight attendants jumped into action, shepherding passengers out of the side doors.
Passenger Ashley Zook posted several videos of the aftermath, including one of her dangling upside down while still strapped in her seat immediately after the crash.
Another traveler, John Nelson, recorded video outside of the plane as emergency response crews from the airport rushed in to put out the fire raging from the wreckage.
“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 News. “Then we were going sideways. I’m not even sure how many times we tumbled, but we ended upside down.”
“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.”
All 80 people on board — 76 passengers and four crew members — scrambled their way out of the mangled plane safely before it burst into flames, dramatic footage from the runway shows.
Miraculously just 21 people were hospitalized with only minor injuries — and 19 of those were released from the hospital, Delta said in an update on Tuesday.
The CRJ 900 aircraft, operated by the Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air, departed from Minneapolis about 11:47 a.m. and crashed at about 2:15 p.m.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation.
The crash followed a weekend winter storm that dumped about 9 inches of snow on the airport, forcing crews to work overnight Sunday to clear key runways.
“This is an active investigation. It’s very early on,” Todd Aitken, fire chief at Toronto Pearson International Airport, told reporters. “It’s really important that we do not speculate. What we can say is the runway was dry and there were no crosswind conditions.”
