Delta offers $30,000 to passengers in Canada plane flip – ‘no strings attached’

Delta Air Lines is offering passengers of a jet that

caught fire and flipped over

on a

Toronto

runway $30,000 each – “no strings attached”.

Flight 4819 crashed after touching down at Toronto’s Pearson airport on Monday afternoon. Videos of the crash were

captured by witnesses

and then passengers inside the plane.

Twenty-one of the plane’s 80 passengers and crew were initially transported to the hospital after the incident. All were released by Thursday, according to a

statement

from Delta. The flight was operated by the Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air. Canadian and American authorities are investigating the incident.

“It’s horrifying when you look at the video,” the Delta CEO, Ed Bastian, told CBS Mornings. “You can imagine when I received the text minutes after it happened, hearing there was a regional jet upside down on an active runway.

“The reality is safety is embedded into our system. Air travel in the United States is the safest form of travel.”

A spokesperson for Delta told

CBS News

that the $30,000 “gesture has no strings attached and does not affect rights”.

One of the passengers onboard the plane, paramedic Pete Carlson of Minnesota, told

local news station KMSP

: “For at least a brief period of time I thought, ‘I’m not getting off this plane.’

Related:

US aviation sector requests emergency funds after recent alarming crashes

“The next thing I know, I’m upside down and my seatbelt was still belted,” he said.

The crash followed a large storm in Toronto that dumped

20in

of snow on the city, with the airport struggling to catch up with a backlog of canceled and delayed flights.

The incident comes after a

high-profile disaster

in Washington DC, where a passenger plane collided in midair with a army Black Hawk helicopter, killing 67 people and sending both into the Potomac River. The crash was the worst air disaster in the US since 2001, and also highlighted

years of warnings

from air traffic controllers, who highlighted how employees in towers were understaffed and overworked.

In spite of the disaster, the Trump administration has

sought to fire

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety workers and announced employees of SpaceX would consult at the agency, alarming

European aviation experts

.

SpaceX is owned by billionaire Elon Musk, an adviser to Trump, leading the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge). The FAA ordered an investigation into the breakup of a SpaceX rocket just a

few days

before Trump took office. The FAA is leaderless, after Musk called on the former head

to resign

.