The Delta plane, which turned over when it landed in Toronto last month, had fallen too quickly, a preliminary report showed Thursday without identifying the cause of the crash.
Canada's Transportation Safety Board has released its first findings following the February 17 accident in which 21 people were sent to hospital after the plane hit a hard-hitting runway and flipped upside down, causing an explosion. No one was killed.
“Investigating this accident takes time, as many questions remain unanswered,” TSB said in a video summarizing the initial findings.
A detailed timeline for the pre-landing event showed that the descent rate was 672 feet (FPM) per minute about 20 seconds before contact with the runway.
But “less than a second of touchdowns…the descent rate was recorded at 1110 fpm,” the report states.
Former TSB investigator David McNair told AFP that the Bombardier CRJ-900's descent rate was “well above the hard landing standards.”
The TSB emphasized that initial findings should not be understood as identifying the cause of the crash.
“The information in the report may be incomplete or altered during the course of the investigation, and new information may be obtained after this preliminary report is published,” the report states.
The flight, which has 76 passengers and four crew members, had landed in Canada's largest city after a flight from the city of Minneapolis, USA.
The crash was the latest in a recent series of aviation accidents in North America. This includes an airborne collision between a US Army helicopter and a Washington passenger jet that killed 67 people, as well as a crash crash of a medical transport in Philadelphia.
AMP/BS/SST
