Pearson crash outcome was a ‘miracle’ decades in the making

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An emergency call came in — a jet had just crashed on the northernmost runway at Canada’s busiest airport. Fire and emergency crews rushed to the scene.  Flight attendants helped survivors flee the wreckage. Inquiries from media poured in. And observers wandered the scene, taking notes and finding tiny improvements in case the real thing ever came to pass.  

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No, this wasn’t the crash scene you were thinking of. It was a mock exercise that took place at Toronto Pearson in 2023, involving hundreds of airport and airline staff, first responders and government officials. The airport hosted another of its regular exercises in tabletop form just a few months ago. When Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 crashed on the very same runway at Pearson in February, there would have been little question about the role of each person and what they needed to do next. 

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Given the dramatic footage from the Delta crash, the fact that no one died has been hailed as a miracle. In fact, it was the kind of miracle commercial aviation has spent decades preparing for — the sum of many lessons learned and refinements made by investigators, regulators, manufacturers, airlines, airports and emergency responders. 

There has been a spate of air incidents around the world in recent weeks. They have been much discussed on social media, but while they are concerning, they are almost certainly coincidental. Misinformation cannot rule the conversation. Air remains the safest form of travel. In 2023, the International Air Transport Association noted that statistically, an air traveller would need to fly every day for 103,000 years before dying in an accident. By contrast, the lifetime odds of dying in a car crash are about one in 95, according to the United States National Safety Council. 

Canada’s crash rate is one of the best in the world — two per million aircraft movements, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Two is worse than zero, but we should take heart from how much has been done and continues to be done to make commercial air travel so safe. 

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Start at Canada’s airports, where decades of experience have made safety a constant preoccupation for operational teams and planners. Our airports are required to develop comprehensive emergency plans, control rooms and training for a wide variety of scenarios, and Transport Canada mandates regular testing.  

Our airport teams are also among the world’s top experts in dealing with winter weather, a constant factor for commercial flight in this country. We have world-leading de-icing facilities, using techniques that have been improving for almost a century, both on land and in the air –— much has been learned from previous winter incidents where wing ice was deemed to be a factor, such as those at Gander, NL, in 1985 and Dryden, Ont., in 1989. 

Canadian airports also monitor their runways constantly, assessing surface conditions and watching for foreign object debris, especially during winter operations. On a clear weather day like the one of the Delta crash, staff across the country would have been tracking all this and relaying information in real time to Nav Canada air traffic controllers and the pilots of all inbound flights. 

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In many cases, the outcome of a crash landing depends not just on the airport but on heavily trained airline staff. Pilots make critical decisions about whether and how to land given the local conditions and the capabilities of their planes. And for every miraculous feat of piloting, there are examples where highly trained flight attendants have stepped in to guide passengers from a stricken plane to safety, as Delta’s did. 

That training is critical, because airport firefighters are mandated to prioritize extinguishing fire before rescue work. This is different from firefighting in buildings, because most buildings aren’t laden with combustible jet fuel. Of course, airport firefighters are fully trained to enter an aircraft when necessary, but putting out the fire is the first priority, with passengers meant to evacuate the plane as quickly as possible under the guidance of a professional flight crew. Videos of the Delta crash at Toronto Pearson appear to show this dynamic working as it should. Canadian airports consistently meet, and often exceed, federal safety standards.

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The planes themselves are also getting safer. Some commentators have speculated that lives were saved by the design of Delta’s CRJ-900 (Canadian-designed by Bombardier), including its sturdy, fire-resistant seats and breakaway wings, which quickly separate the jet’s cabin from its flammable fuel supply. Exactly what happened remains for investigators to say. But all modern aircraft designs are the heirs to decades of safety work by crash investigators. Accident probes by agencies like Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB) produce recommendations that are considered and acted on where feasible. Not all get adopted, but safety standards get ever-more stringent over time and they tend to spread. For instance, the TSB investigation into the 1998 crash of Swissair flight 111 near Halifax produced a 350-page report and led to many changes in U.S. federal standards on aircraft wiring and fire prevention. 

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So yes, it might seem astounding that everyone aboard Delta flight 4819 survived but the real miracle here is the miracle of flight — the fact that in barely a century, commercial air has evolved from gravity-defying novelty to the safest form of travel. Over the coming weeks, if you want to feel reassured, go beyond social media threads and conjecture and wait for the investigation. And then, watch to see what lessons and refinements are adopted by our industry. Canadian airports will continue, as they have always done, to reinvest back into modernizing flight innovation and leadership in safety standards.  


Monette Pasher is president of the Canadian Airports Council.  

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