When Delta Flight 4819 crashed upon landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport after a routine flight from Minneapolis, passengers found themselves in a nightmarish situation: their plane was upside down, emergency responders were rushing to the scene, and they needed to evacuate fast.
And yet, amid the chaos, someone still felt the need to tell a survivor to put their phone away.
A now-viral video posted on Instagram and now doing the rounds on Reddit shows passengers making their way out of the overturned aircraft, their movements slowed by both the disorienting angle and the urgency of the situation. In the footage, one passenger is recording as they exit the plane, only to be told to stop filming and focus on the evacuation.
To which the only reasonable response is: Are you kidding me?
The idea that, in 2025, someone needs to be reminded that getting out of a crashed airplane should take precedence over recording it for social media is absurd. But here we are. As one Reddit commenter put it bluntly:
“Having to tell people to put their phone away when trying to get out of an upside down plane is crazy. You can record once you are out of the aircraft.”
That should be obvious. But it’s apparently not.
The obsession with capturing every moment (no matter how life-threatening) has reached a point where someone escaping a plane wreck still thinks, Wait, let me get this on video. Never mind the fact that emergency evacuations are supposed to happen in 90 seconds or less. Never mind that every second counts when you’re trying to get away from a potentially burning aircraft. Never mind that you can always pull out your phone after you’ve gotten to safety.
There’s documenting an experience, and then there’s making a bad situation worse.
This isn’t the first time evacuation procedures have been delayed by people unwilling to part with their devices. Flight attendants have been warning for years that passengers trying to grab their bags can slow evacuations and put lives at risk. And while the instinct to document a shocking event is understandable, it shouldn’t override basic survival instincts.
To be fair, the passenger filming the Delta crash was likely in shock. One second, it’s a routine flight. The next, you’re hanging upside down in your seat, trying to make sense of what just happened. But that’s all the more reason to listen to the people trained to handle these situations. When the priority is getting out fast, anything slowing that down (including your iPhone) is a problem.
Thankfully, no one died in this crash, though some passengers sustained injuries, including three in critical condition. That’s an outcome worth being grateful for. But this incident is just another reminder of how bizarrely glued we are to our devices—even in moments of literal life and death.
There will always be time to record the aftermath. But when you’re inside an overturned plane? Maybe just focus on getting out first.
