‘That training kicked in’: How flight attendants leapt into action after Toronto plane crash

As authorities investigate the cause of Monday’s crash, broad consensus about part of the aftermath has emerged: The pair of flight attendants did well to help dozens of passengers evacuate from the overturned aircraft.

(CNN) — After Delta Flight 4819’s cabin rolled over and came to rest in a terrifying crash landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport, a flight attendant stood on what had been the ceiling – one leg propped on an upturned baggage compartment – and addressed passengers who’d unbuckled themselves from upside-down seats.

“Drop everything! Drop it. Come on,” she shouts in a video recorded by a passenger, her voice composed but forceful as she guides people to leave through an open exit door. “Put that phone away!”

As authorities investigate the cause of Monday’s crash, broad consensus about part of the aftermath has emerged: The pair of flight attendants did well to help dozens of passengers evacuate from the overturned aircraft.

“They performed their work perfectly as aviation’s first responders,” said Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, using one of the union’s favorite descriptors for its more than 50,000 members.

“This is the reason that we are on the plane: to evacuate passengers from a crash landing like this safely,” she said. “And they did that.”

Though flight attendants help keep passengers comfortable in part by giving out drinks, snacks, blankets and headphones, attendants are first meant to help keep travelers safe – a job that requires extensive and repeated training.

“They are responsible for much more than picking up trash and serving sodas,” said Michael McCormick, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “They’re trained professionals responsible for the safety of the passengers. And they did a phenomenal job.”

All 80 people on board Monday’s flight – four crew and 76 passengers – survived the crash, though officials said 21 people were taken to hospitals with injuries. By Wednesday, all but one had been released, Delta said.

The flight, operated by Delta’s regional partner Endeavor Air, took off from Minneapolis bound for the Toronto area, which strong winds had been hitting all day.

Shortly after 2 p.m., as the flight approached Toronto Pearson – located in the suburb of Mississauga – air traffic controllers warned the pilots about 38 mph gusts.

The aircraft landed hard on the runway, video shows, the right wing making contact with the ground before falling away in a blaze of fire. The aircraft, a CRJ-900, then rolled over as it skidded along the landing strip. When it came to a rest, the passengers were hanging upside down, strapped in their seats as firefighters rushed to the scene to extinguish the flames.

The two flight attendants have not been publicly identified, and they have not spoken out amid the ongoing investigation. But footage captured by passenger Pete Koukov provides a brief glimpse of their actions, and how they aligned with their training. That training, according to Nelson, the union president, is tailored by aircraft type and covers varied scenarios, including evacuations by both land and water.

“This is one of the scenarios that we talk about: landing and finding yourselves actually upside down,” she said.

Video shows attendant directing passengers

Flight attendants are trained to respond this way in the first moments after a crash: quickly locate the emergency exit, and ask passengers to remain in their seats or stand back as the attendants determine the scene is safe, Nelson told CNN. Then, they would instruct passengers to release their seat belts and come to an exit – whether an emergency door or, in a more extreme crash, a hole in the side of the plane.

As passengers evacuate, the attendants would ask the first two able-bodied people to remain just outside to help other passengers, Nelson said.

Passengers would be instructed to leave behind their luggage, because it could impede the evacuation or slow their ability to get away from the aircraft, Nelson said. “The biggest risk in that moment is fire engulfing the cabin before everyone can get off,” she said, noting flight attendants are trained for that reason to evacuate passengers in as few as 90 seconds.

Indeed, Koukov’s video appears to show pieces of this training unfolding during Monday’s evacuation: The flight attendant stands just inside the emergency exit, shouting commands to the passengers – including directing them to leave behind their belongings. As she pushes passengers through the exit, they are met by two men standing on either side of the emergency exit, who help lift evacuees onto the tarmac.

This training becomes second nature, according to Nelson, allowing flight attendants to respond automatically in a situation that might leave anyone else in a state of shock.

“That’s why we go through training,” she said. “Almost every single debrief that I have ever heard from any kind of critical incident, the flight attendants say, ‘It was incredible. That training kicked in, and I just moved to action.’”

Flight attendant training programs vary slightly by airline. Delta, for example, requires seven weeks of instruction in Atlanta following the hiring process and a conditional job offer, according to its website.

Federal regulations require a variety of emergency training scenarios, from evacuations and firefighting to rapid decompression of the cabin and hijackings. They also require crew members to undergo recurrent training every 24 months.

“Air travel remains the safest form of transportation,” Deborah Flint, CEO of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, said at a news conference Tuesday, echoing a mantra often cited by air travel experts, including in recent weeks amid a series of high-profile accidents, some of them deadly.

Accidents for regularly scheduled commercial airlines are rare. But of those that happen, many are not catastrophic – including those involving turbulence or collisions between planes taxiing on the ground – leaving flight attendants in a position to utilize their training.

Among regularly scheduled US carriers, 1,133 accidents happened from 1983 to 2017, according to a 2020 National Transportation Safety Board analysis, which defined accidents as incidents that caused at least one serious injury or substantial damage to the plane. Just 35 were considered serious, meaning they involved a fire, at least one serious injury or death, and a substantially damaged or destroyed aircraft.

Regardless, the flight attendants are there, ready to help passengers and survivors.

“Every time you board a flight, you are greeted by flight attendants and by flight crew,” Flint said. “Often, it’s their job to make us comfortable and confident about the flight ahead, and they do an incredible job with that. But we saw the most important role that they play in action yesterday.”

“I thank each and every one of these heroes, every flight attendant and crew member on Delta Flight 4819,” she said. “I also thank every flight attendant and crew member across the industry.”

CNN’s Holly Yan contributed to this report.

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