Paramedic aboard flipped plane at Toronto Pearson recounts urgent rescue as jet

Michael Nolan arrived at the airport early to pick up his old friend Peter Carlson on Monday, so he decided to pull up to the fence just beyond Runway 23 and pass the time watching planes land.

The two veteran paramedics had met at a conference about 10 years previous and were eager to reunite at a paramedicine expo in Toronto this week. As first vice-president of the Ontario Association of Paramedic Chiefs and the chief paramedic for Renfrew County, Mr. Nolan was co-chairing the event, while his old friend, who works in Minnesota, was scheduled to give a talk.

Over the years, they had bonded over tales of calamity from their respective countries. Never did they expect to share roles in one such disaster: the crash landing of Delta 4819 at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Monday afternoon. The flight from Minneapolis carried 76 passengers and four crew members. All survived.

Mr. Carlson was among them.

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At around 2 p.m., Mr. Nolan consulted a flight radar app and looked to the skies for Mr. Carlson’s plane. It was a windy day with blowing snow, but Mr. Nolan spotted the Bombardier CRJ900 descending toward the runway around 2:15.

On board, Mr. Carlson was staring out at Toronto from his window seat. At the outset, the captain had warned of strong winds, overcast skies and blowing snow at the destination. “Part of my mind during the landing was sensitive to that,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview. “But it felt very uneventful – until it wasn’t.”

The first indication of anything amiss was not a sound or a sight, but a feeling. Mr. Carlson recalls his back compressing, then his neck, then his head.

“I don’t know the terminology but it definitely felt like we dropped very heavily and very quickly,” he said.

Delta passengers recall moment their plane crashed at Toronto Pearson airport

He remembers the feeling of being sideways, followed by screams and then the entire fuselage inverting.

“The second that the wheels hit the ground, then everything happened,” another passenger, Peter Koukov, told The New York Times. “The next thing I know, we’re sideways.”

The plane came to rest belly up, the passengers hanging upside down.

From his distant perspective, Mr. Nolan could only see a thick black cloud. He texted his friend.

“You okay?” he typed.

Behind that plume of smoke, Mr. Carlson was struggling to orient himself. “There was real confusion in terms of the slide, the flip and finding myself upside down,” he said. “I had a moment of snapping into it. Where am I? Am I okay? Am I alive? Do my arms work? Did my legs work?”

He heard a neighbouring passenger release his seat belt and safely land with a thud on the aircraft’s new floor. Mr. Carlson decided to do the same.

The odour of aviation fuel flooded the cabin. He could see gas flowing past the windows. If it all ignited, they were done for, he thought. So he typed what he imagined could be a final message to his wife – “I love you and I love our kids” – and sprung into action.

He helped a mother and son seated next to him release their seat belts. Bags that had once been stored under seats were falling all around them. He looked for the emergency exits and the flight attendants. They were concerned about opening the doors with all the fuel flowing around.

While they waited, he showed the boy next to him a photo of his own children to help calm him before helping to guide him out the door and into the -18 wind chill.

Outside, he recalls passengers and crew all chipping in to guide everyone safely away from the smouldering plane.

Beyond the airport fence, Mr. Nolan kept checking his phone for a response.

Finally one came. “On the tarmac,” Mr. Carlson texted.

“Oh good,” Mr. Nolan responded, thinking his friend had landed safely. “It looked like the plane immediately ahead of you crashed.”

“That’s mine,” Mr. Carlson texted back, attaching a picture of passengers on the snow-covered tarmac.

Mr. Nolan contacted the local paramedic chief and found out the passengers who didn’t need a hospital were huddling on a bus to stay…