A professional skier and content creator has opened up about the viral video he recorded after surviving the Delta Flight 4819 crash-landing in Toronto. The plane flipped upside down after it touched down.
Pete Koukov, in an interview with CNN Sports, said it was intuitive to record the inverted plane while he and the other 79 passengers evacuated it. He said that everything appeared to be going smoothly just before his flight from Minneapolis was about to land in Toronto. Then he suddenly feared he was going to die.
“I was almost the best person to be taking a video in that situation,” Mr Koukov told the outlet.
The video, which Koukov uploaded on Instagram the day of the incident, has 244 million views and nearly 9 million likes so far. His incredible footage showed the world how terrible the accident was and how fortunate the passengers were to be alive.
In the video, Mr Koukov is seen walking out the door of the Delta plane and onto the snowy ground. He then turns his camera to reveal the exterior of the damaged, upside-down aircraft.
He is heard exclaiming, “Holy f***! I’m shocked. Oh my f***ing God. Yo, I was just on this f**king plane!”
Mr Koukov said he was quite familiar with high-risk scenarios because he is a skier. “Although I was in a very stressful situation, it wasn’t anything that I knew I wasn’t able to do,” he said.
“There were moments of ‘Are we going to blow up? Is there going to be a fire?’ Until I was off the plane, that’s when it was like ‘OK, I can breathe,'” he added.
“I knew this was an insane event in my life and I made sure there was a recording of it,” Mr Koukov told CNN.
Being upside down and in tight spaces was nothing new to him. His social media accounts have videos of him street skiing, skiing through small openings and over buildings in the city.
In 2023, he shared a video of himself skiing down the steep side of a South Dakota church structure, describing the ascent as “the scariest thing I’ll ever do.”
“Skiing is such like a niche and it’s so small that you kind of do… more than just being an athlete, whether it’s filming, editing, producing, directing,” Mr Koukov said.
The Delta Air Lines Bombardier CRJ900, which took off from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on February 17, crashed when it touched down at Pearson International Airport. All 80 passengers surprisingly survived the crash-landing.