It’s no coincidence that there were no fatalities in the harrowing crash landing of Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 in Toronto on Monday, says an expert.
All 76 passengers and four crew members on board were safely evacuated from the CRJ900 after it caught fire and flipped upside down upon landing at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport on Feb. 17. And a simple but sophisticated safety measure played a major role.
“The seatbelts were key to everyone’s safe evacuation on the flight and no fatalities,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and a flight attendant of nearly 29 years, tells PEOPLE. “If someone had not been wearing their seatbelt in this crash, the likelihood of a death would become very high.”
Nelson shared how both plane seatbelts and seats are specially designed to withstand some of the most severe incidents, from unexpected turbulence to the rare case of a plane crash.
“The seatbelts are constructed to hold people against severe, incredible g-forces,” she explains, adding that the seats themselves “are also designed to best protect people in an airplane crash or for that matter, in a severe turbulence incident.”
“Those seats are bolted to the aircraft and designed in a way to best hold people for survivability,” she says. “And the seatbelts are designed to strap to that seat to hold people, whether it would be against forces of a crash landing or as we saw on Alaska 1282,” the incident in which a plane had part of its fuselage blow out mid-air in January 2024. That incident saw passengers belongings and even clothes sucked out of the cabin.
She notes how the “explosive decompression with the door plug blowing out” could have turned into a fatal accident if passengers weren’t wearing their seatbelts.
“This is why we tell people to keep your seatbelt on at all times during the flight because you never know what’s going to happen up in the air with turbulence or potentially an explosive decompression like that. Your survivability is much, much higher if you are wearing that seatbelt.”
One of the passengers on Delta 4918 recalled everyone “upside down hanging like bats” from the ceiling of the cabin after the plane had rolled onto it’s back on the tarmac, held firmly in place by the safety restraints until they were able to climb down, either on their own or with the assistance of other passengers, crew and first responders.
In addition to wearing their seatbelts, passengers following flight attendants’ instructions is “the most important thing they could do” in a situation like the one in Toronto.
“And that starts, actually, when they board the plane, and how they’re supposed to stow their luggage, all of these things. All of the instructions that we give in preparing for that flight to depart is all instructions that have been put in place because of studying previous airline disasters.”
She adds that watching the safety briefing before takeoff is also crucial to survive any “critical incident.”
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Delta Flight 4819, operated by regional subsidiary Endeavor Air, crashed at approximately 2:45 p.m. local time, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The plane was en route from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, a Delta spokesperson said.
The FAA confirmed in a statement that “the Transportation Safety Board of Canada will be in charge of the investigation and will provide any updates.” That investigation is currently underway.
“The hearts of the entire global Delta family are with those affected by today’s incident at Toronto-Pearson International Airport,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a statement. “I want to express my thanks to the many Delta and Endeavor team members and the first responders on site.
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