Passengers aboard the doomed Delta Airlines plane that crashed, burned and flipped upside-down on a Toronto runway this week may have been saved thanks to a small but all-important safety feature.
The Delta Flight 4819, operated by Delta subsidiary Endeavour Air, was coming into land at Toronto Pearson Airport from Minnesota on Monday but failed to settle on the frozen tarmac and skidded on arrival.
Videos capturing the dramatic touchdown show the plane's fuselage appearing to burst into flames before the aircraft makes a sharp right turn and flips.
Miraculously, while 21 people were taken to hospital - and have since been released - following the incident, including a woman in her 40s and man in his 60s in critical condition, all of the plane's 80 passengers survived.
Aircraft experts believe they were saved by a little-known safety feature built into most planes that spares the fuselage from critical damage.
Speaking to CNN, the network's safety analyst David Soucie, a former Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) official, said "breakaway bolts" ensured passengers weren't injured by the force of the crash.
He said the bolts, which are used to secure the wing to the main body, can be jettisoned in case of an emergency.
Mr Soucie explained:
"It's testament to the fact that the engineering that goes behind these airplanes, you notice that both of the wings are off of the airplane right now. And that's by design.
They have breakaway explosive bolts that hold those wings on so that if the aircraft does go sideways, and it does hit the wing, if that wing was too stiff, it would tear the fuselage apart and dislodge the seats and damage the fuselage.
"But it's designed to allow that when it's a huge impact on the wing to strip those wings off. And then that aircraft can continue to move and come to rest safely."
Another expert, former National Transportation Safety Board air safety investigator Greg Feith, said it was a "good thing" the plane was able to shed its wings.
He agreed that doing so allowed the fuselage tube to stay intact, enhancing "the survivability for all these people".
The expert said:
"That usually takes up a lot of the major impact forces. And because the tube, the fuselage tube, stayed intact, that’s what enhanced the survivability for all these people, even though there was a small fire that did break out."
