The Delta Air Lines plane that flipped upon landing in Toronto last month was descending too quickly, a preliminary report indicated Thursday, without identifying a cause of the crash.Canada’s Transport Safety Board released its initial findings following the February 17 accident that sent 21 people to hospital after the plane hit the runway hard and flipped upside down, triggering an explosion. No one was killed.”The investigation into this accident will take some time, as many questions remain unanswered,” the TSB said in a video summarizing the initial findings. A detailed timeline of the events prior to landing said the rate of descent was at 672 feet per minute (fpm) about 20 seconds before contact with the runway. But, “less than one second before touchdown… the rate of descent was recorded at 1110 fpm,” the report said. Former TSB investigator David McNair told AFP the Bombardier CRJ-900’s rate of descent “exceeded the hard landing criteria by quite a bit.”The TSB stressed its initial findings should not be understood as identifying a cause of the crash. “The information in the report may be incomplete or change in the course of the investigation, and new information may be obtained after this preliminary report is published,” the report said. The flight with 76 passengers and four crew was landing in Canada’s largest city after a flight from the US city of Minneapolis.The crash was the latest in a recent string of air incidents in North America, including a mid-air collision between a US Army helicopter and a passenger jet in Washington that killed 67 people, and a medical transport plane crash in Philadelphia that left seven dead.
Thu, 20 Mar 2025 21:14:23 GMT
