Travelers arriving at Pittsburgh International Airport were well aware of the plane crash in Toronto on Monday. Some say the crash didn’t overly concern them - while others say it made them nervous to be in the air.
“Just a lot of crashes lately - it’s really scary,” Marina McKenney told Channel 11.
RELATED COVERAGE >>> 17 people hurt after Delta plane flips upside down upon landing in Toronto
McKenney flew home to Pittsburgh International Airport Monday night, just hours after the Delta plane from Minneapolis crashed upon landing in Toronto. McKenney says she got the alert right before getting onto her flight.
“I have really bad flight anxiety, so I’m like, ‘this is not what I want to see right before I’m about to board the plane,’” she said.
According to Delta, 76 passengers and four crew members were aboard the plane when it flipped and ended up on its roof.
“It was a miracle that no one was killed,” Craig Conroy said.
Craig “Buzz” Conroy is an aviation crisis management expert who helps investigators determine the cause of aviation accidents by analyzing black boxes. Conroy says 70-mile-per-hour winds in Toronto made flight conditions nearly impossible.
“There are two things in the back of the plane. One [is] called the horizontal stabilizer, the other is called the vertical stabilizer, and they allow the pilot to direct the plane in a straight angle and normally, even in high wind, they would help to keep it along with the traditional wings but in situations like that it breaks all the rules of physics,” Conroy explained.
Conroy says the black box from the tail of the plane will give investigators a true idea of what happened.
“The preflight planning that the pilots do usually have a pretty unmistakable weather pattern that they look for or they avoid or they don’t take off if it’s too bad, and then other things come up along the way and you have to do the best you can,” he said.
When asked why we’ve seen an uptick in plane crashes, Conroy says it’s hard to know for sure - but that history has shown these patterns.
“Statistically, if you look over the years and I’ve been looking at it for over 40 years - it seems like they’re in clusters,” Conroy said.
Airport officials say four flights that were supposed to go to Toronto were diverted to Pittsburgh after the crash. They’ve since departed.
Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts.
Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW
©2025 Cox Media Group
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/cmg/XCUXZC2XYZHCRGNNGKFEX6U3LQ.png)
