It was like any other business trip for Minnesota frequent flyer Pete Carleton: walk through TSA, fill up the water bottle past security and chat with colleagues at the gate.
On that cold February day, just before noon, he boarded Delta Connection flight 4819 to Toronto with ease. He found his seat, 9D, by the window and put his Beats earbuds in and played one of his favorite Canadian rock bands, The Tragically Hip.
“(I) got on the plane, and I did as I always did, you know, sit down, put my ear buds in, tuned out,” he said. “(I) didn’t talk to the dude next to me. He didn’t talk to me, you know, just typical travel.”
Things went smoothly until the plane was preparing to land and the unthinkable happened. The airplane’s main landing gear support failed, and the body of the jet went sliding down the runway. A wing broke off on impact. The tail detached. When it finally stopped, the plane was upside down. The floor became the ceiling, and the ceiling became that floor, leaving the passengers “hanging like bats” from their seats.
This was one in a series of high-profile incidents that raised serious questions about aviation safety this year, but miraculously, Carleton and every single person on that flight survived.
“I’m lucky as hell … to have come through this,” Carleton said, but the things he saw and experienced on that plane 10 months ago still give him panic attacks and a newfound fear of flying that the seasoned traveler believes will be with him for the rest of his life.
The details of what happened inside the plane remain vivid for Carleton. As the nearly 90-minute flight was winding down, “it was really bouncy,” he said. “Just didn’t feel right … I felt we were coming in fast,” he said.
“We just hit, like a ton of bricks, and the first thing I see is flames in my window.”
He was terrified as he watched sheets of fire billow outside his window, while the sound of airplane metal skidding across frozen concrete filled the cabin.
Moments later, he said the flames just disappeared when the wing on the right side snapped from the body of the plane.
As the cabin started to roll, “That’s when … I banged my head hard against the side.”
“It seemed like we were skidding forever and then it finally came to a stop,” Carleton said.
The cabin was quiet, except for the alarms going off on people’s Apple watches as the devices detected the severity of the noise and the impact, he said.
With the fire nowhere in sight, Carleton’s immediate thoughts turned to making sure he had a “fighting chance” to make it out alive.
As they hung, staring at the top of the aircraft down below – blood rushing to their heads – he checked on the stranger he had tuned out initially as the flight began. The stranger checked on him too, helping him unbuckle his seatbelt and get down.
Carleton fell onto the roof of the aircraft, bruising himself. Many passengers were trying to get down without hurting others as they fell.
“I helped the guy across the aisle and another one,” Carleton said.
Those onboard yelled, “Open the door!” he remembered.
Passengers scrambled to help each other in the minutes before the doors opened.
Jet fuel flowed into the cabin, filling the space as Carleton, frazzled and disheveled, crawled toward the exit, tossing luggage that had fallen out of the upside-down overhead compartments out of the way to clear a path for his fellow passengers. A preliminary report later said the plane was carrying about 6,000 pounds of fuel at the time of the crash.
The cause of the crash has not yet been released.
Once he finally got off the plane – drenched in fuel – he walked a few dozen steps from the aircraft and turned back to look for one of his colleagues who had already escaped the plane.
Carleton stood on the tarmac and watched two firefighters dive from the plane just as part of the wreckage exploded. They had jumped from the same emergency exit that he had walked out of moments before.
He walked away with nothing. His phone, medication and luggage were left behind.
Carleton felt his ears ringing as he stood watching a family with a child and a man struggling to breathe leave in a helicopter before two buses arrived to take the rest of the passengers to the terminal. The stench of the jet fuel was so pungent that the windows had to be opened as they rode.
There was a mix of emotions on the bus. Some passengers cried; others were in shock. Some had videos and photos of the incident they were showing others. But everyone watched over one another.
When they arrived at the terminal, the passengers were shuttled to an unused gate, where police, EMTs and Delta Air Lines personnel waited to check on them. Clergy from nearly every religion was also present.
“They were all just looking at us as we had come through,” Carleton said.
When he finally got to his hotel, Carleton took shower after shower to try and remove the stink of the jet fluids. After each shower, he said he would get out, still smell it, and get back in again.
That night, he went for beer and food with his co-workers, still dressed in the only clothes he had – the ones covered in jet fuel. A kind stranger paid for their meal that night.
He spent about $170 in calls from his hotel room that night, talking to his wife, Carolynn, and their children.
The next morning, he walked into the hotel gift shop where a stranger, having seen the news, realized what Carleton had been through the day before. The man went to his truck and brought Carleton one of his sweatshirts to use.
Later that morning, the company he was in Toronto to meet with bought sweatpants and toiletries for him and his colleagues before flying them all home.
“With all the stuff going on in the world, humanity kicked in for a little while, which was really refreshing,” Carleton said.
Later, Delta offered $30,000 in cash, “no-strings-attached,” to every passenger on board the plane.
In a statement sent to CNN last week, a spokesperson for Delta said, “For everyone at Endeavor Air and Delta, nothing is more important than the safety of our customers and our people. That’s why we remain fully engaged as participants in the investigation led by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. Out of respect for the integrity of this work that will continue through their final report, Endeavor Air and Delta will refrain from comment.”
Currently about 55 people are involved in cases against Endeavor and Delta due to the crash, according to Carleton’s attorney, Jim Brauchle, an aviation attorney at Motley Rice LLC.
Now as Carleton faces the first winter since the plane crash, the cold weather of Minneapolis doesn’t help with the trauma he has faced.
“We had our first snowstorm here,” he said. “The howling wind and the blowing snow woke me up and it was like I was on that tarmac again.”
He’s also had dreams where he’s driving and sees fire coming from the floorboards and sometimes the windows, just like the fire he saw through his airplane window.
Now Carleton plays white noise in the background as a distraction while he sleeps, to try to calm himself.
The trauma also lives in his day-to-day life in other ways.
He has hearing loss, and his speech has changed. Immediately after the crash, he recalls his wife telling him he didn’t sound the same – his voice was different, but that wasn’t all.
“He’d get up and go, ‘OK, so what am I? Where am I going? You know, what am I doing?’ You know, that type of stuff. It was, it was hard,” his wife Carolynn said of the days right after the crash.
She said she’s had to be really patient.
“It’s different. He’s listening, but he’s not listening. He’s responding but not really responding,” Carolynn said.
These days Carleton still works but he’s not traveling. He says work has been therapeutic yet he acknowledges things still haven’t returned to the way they used to be. “I did take time to get my head together … but, yeah, I’m not the same guy as I was then.”
Flying is still a challenge; he’s only flown a few times since the incident and says he can’t do it alone. On one of the flights, he clutched his wife’s hand the entire time.
He’s planning to travel by train with his wife and would like to go overseas once he retires. He said he still plans to fly Delta, just not in the winter.
While panic attacks, the fear of flying in the winter and other trauma triggers are still present, Carleton has found an escape that is having a positive effect on his life.
He’s been digging into his fascination with raptors and helping preserve wildlife by volunteering in the carpentry area of a raptor center in Minneapolis. It’s a small step, but he sees it as a start. He says he wants to find other ways to change the world around him with his second chance.
“I’m looking to give back,” he said.
Carleton realizes the horrifying event in Toronto will likely loom over him for the rest of his life. And though he is grateful his life was spared, he can’t help but ask himself, “Why? Why am I still here? What am I supposed to do?”
