Delta Airlines flight 4819 made its bumpy touchdown on the runway at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, flipped upside down and came to a screeching halt in roughly seven seconds, based on videos of Monday’s near disaster. It nevertheless left “plenty of time to be scared,” according to Pete Carlson a passenger on the flight who was, by eerie coincidence en route to Toronto to attend a conference of paramedics.

“One minute you’re landing and waiting to see your friends and your people and the next minute you’re physically upside down and just really turned around,” Carlson told CBC News, adding of his short ride in an aluminum vehicle skidding against pavement, “it sounded… really, just cement and metal.”

Most of the 76 passengers and four crew members on the flight from Minneapolis were suspended above the ground by their seatbelts. And this, dear readers, is the poster shot for the advances in survivability that travelers take for granted. Thought I bet Pete Carlson and his fellow passengers have come to a new and better appreciation for seatbelts, safety briefings and flight attendants.

They “led passengers to safety amidst smoke and fire,” said Deborah Flint, the President and CEO of the Toronto Pearson International Airport. “I thank every one of these heroes, every flight attendant and crew member.”

What makes this air accident unusual is the paucity of similar incidents. I can think of none in modern commercial aviation. Sure, you’ll see smaller, lighter general aviation aircraft flip over during bad landings or in windy conditions. The only commercial flight in recent memory that even comes close is Asiana 214, which landed short of the runway in San Francisco in the summer of 2013, became airborne once again and spun on its horizontal axis before pancaking back onto the ground.

My friend and fellow air safety specialist, airline pilot John Gadzinski surmises that Delta flight 4819 suffered a collapse of the right landing gear, the only thing he thinks could snap the wing right off the airplane. This chilling sight was documented in some of the post-crash photos found online.

“The only way you can have the entire wing impact the ground like that is structural failure of the landing gear,” he told me. Honestly, an airplane is designed to have gear that can take a lickin’. You can have a hard landing but it shouldn’t buckle like that.”

Official investigations like the one just begun by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada take months or even years to complete, as they should, given the board’s mission to thoroughly and thoughtfully account for all the factors that contribute to unhappy landings. That said, this particular event, rare though it be, shouldn’t be a tough mystery to solve. What it should be is a reminder to everyone who, with eyes agog, is watching the recent parade of air accidents and asking, “Is it safe to fly?”

My answer is this. An industry with this commitment to safety, an industry in which an airplane can spin like a top and land upside down then skid in a shower of sparks along the runway and still see everyone survive is getting some things wrong then trying to fix them. On the flip slide, it’s getting a heck of a lot right. Just ask Pete Carlson.