The pictures quickly made their way around the world—pictures of an aircraft lying upside down in the snow just beyond runway 23 at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. On February 17, Delta flight 4819 landed hard, shearing off the right wing and flipping over before finally sliding to a stop. Remarkably, despite the crash and subsequent fire, all of the passengers and crew escaped. Equally remarkably, few received significant injuries.
Canada’s Transportation Safety Board recently released their preliminary report on the accident and there was one detail that struck me as especially significant and thought-provoking—a detail that teaches an important spiritual lesson.
As far as I can tell, everything that went wrong with flight 4819 went wrong in the last 14 seconds. The details are technical and I needed a pilot friend to explain them to me, but essentially the first officer reduced the engine’s thrust too much and too early—at 153 feet above the runway instead of just a few and at 14 seconds before landing instead of just one or two. The plane responded by slowing to such a degree that it began to descend too quickly and could no longer
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