What caused the Delta Air Lines flight to flip upside-down? Here are the clues

Delta Flight 4819 screams into frame before taking a hard bounce on a snowy runway, erupting in a massive fireball and trailing an ominous plume of pitch-black smoke before flipping 180-degrees and eventually skidding to a stop on its roof.

The chilling footage showing the ill-fated descent of the Delta Air Lines plane may have looked like something out of a thriller movie, but investigators are still trying to piece together what caused the very real and horrific accident that sent 21 people to the hospital.

Miraculously, all 80 people on board lived to tell their harrowing tale, but experts are looking at clues, including whether “extreme” weather — such as a blanket of snow and blustery winds — could have turned the otherwise routine flight from Minneapolis to Toronto into a horrifying brush with catastrophe.

The video suggests the plane may have been in for a rough landing before it even touched the ground.

The Bombardier CRJ-900LR appeared to be tilting in the moments before it hit the tarmac, causing its right-side wing to slam into the ground and rip away from the fuselage, one aviation expert told The Post.

The wobble may have allowed a gust of wind to act like a “spatula” that flipped the plane “like a giant pancake” when it touched down.

The unexpected sudden impact badly rattled passengers, who banded together to ensure everyone made it out of the plane safely.

The CBC reported that there was only a crosswind of about 20 mph at the time of the landing.

Air traffic controllers warned the pilots that the plane that landed ahead of them may have caused an air flow “bump,” the Canadian Press reported.

“There was definitely panic on the plane but then there was kind of confusion, shock, and [a] grateful [feeling] to be off the plane and alive,” passenger Pete Kukov, 28, told The Post.

Kukov, who was in a window seat on the plane’s left side, said there was no warning before the crash, and that he felt no uneasiness at all until the plane started sliding on its side and he found himself upside down.

“It was definitely like a big thud impact and it almost felt like we hit the ground and were bouncing to take off again,” he said.

He also recalls a lot of “shaking and jiggling,” but said overall the crash impact happened pretty quickly.

His back was sore from the impact but he was otherwise uninjured.

He praised the flight crew as well as his fellow passengers for making sure everybody was ok.

“I’m just super grateful to be here. I’m super grateful to the flight crew for being so helpful and efficient at doing what they do, as well as the passengers on board who made sure that everyone got off safely. It clearly worked, nobody died, so I’m very grateful for that.”

Among the survivors was Pete Carlson, who recalled the moments before the plane crashed and flipped over as “forceful” and “disorienting” in an interview with CBC News in which he painstakingly described the “cement and metal” sounds he heard as the jet slammed into the ground.

“One minute you’re landing and waiting to see your friends and your people and the next minute you’re physically upside-down,” Carlson recalled to the outlet, still nursing a visibly bloody head wound.

Although the life-changing incident unfolded in the blink of an eye, Carlson said there was still “plenty of time” for the passengers to fear for their lives in those fleeting moments.

“The absolute initial feeling was ‘I need to get out of this,’” he said of the seconds before he removed his seatbelt and fell down to the ceiling, which had become the floor after the aircraft went belly-up.

But even amid the terrifying chaos, including a cabin reeking of spilled jet fuel as flames licked the derelict aircraft from underneath, survivors’ humanity was on full display.

“Everyone on that plane suddenly became very close in terms of how to help one another, how to console one another,” he said, in a scene he described as “powerful.”

“But there was a definite [sense of] ‘what now? Who’s leading? How do we lead ourselves away from this?’”

He said passengers were checking “row by row” to determine the state of fellow survivors, and whether it was safe to help them unbuckle their seatbelts, all while a torrent of jet fuel could be seen “pouring” over the windows on the jet.

Carlson pointed out that although everyone heard the standard pre-flight safety announcements, “but when you’re suddenly upside-down, rolled over, everything kinda goes out the door,” he said, noting that, as a trained paramedic, he spent much of his time trying to aid in the flow of passengers moving toward a safe exit.

“Everyone seemed … like they were there to make sure we helped each other move out of harm’s way.”

When he finally emerged, Carlson likened it to “stepping out onto the tundra,” but despite the frigid weather was immediately flooded with relief to be free from the upside-down tin prison.

“I didn’t care how cold it was, or how far I had to walk, how long I had to stand — we just wanted out of the aircraft,” he said.

Once clear of the wreckage, as emergency vehicles zoomed by the crowd of passengers, he said he could see one of the jet’s wings had been sheared off in the crash, and said the survivors heard an explosion as fire crews approached.

As the injured were loaded onto a bus, Carlson said he was struck by the unifying feel of the terrifying experience.

“There was just people. No countries, no nothing — there was just people together helping each other.”