When you board a flight to Toronto for a two-week street trip, you’re already anticipating a bit of risk. Usually, that risk revolves around hitting that multi-kink you’ve had pinned in your phone for the past year, but in the case of Pete Koukov, it came before he ever even made it to the spot.
On February 17, 2025, Pete was en route to link up with the Browser Mag crew for their latest video when he became one of 80 people aboard Delta Flight 4819. What should’ve been a routine landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport turned into something else entirely. The plane hit the runway hard on some ice, overturned, and skidded to a stop upside down. Amidst the flames and smoke, all 80 people on board survived. Pete somehow walked away with his phone, the Torment hoodie on his back, and footage of the whole ordeal.
Chances are that footage landed on your feed sometime that week. “being alive feels pretty cool today” was a pretty fitting caption for the evacuation video, which racked up more than eight million views and sent Pete into a weeks-long press tour with just about every news outlet you can imagine. Morning shows, interviews, headlines — he went from heading out on a ski trip to being at the center of one of the year's biggest news stories.
Amid all the coverage, Pete sent us a photo that stuck with us just as much as the footage. We ran it in the opening pages of Issue EIGHT, and it stopped you in your tracks for reasons that had little to do with snowboarding. It was a glimpse of something most of us can barely imagine, captured by someone who happened to have his phone out when everything went sideways…literally.
We wanted to revisit the story beyond the viral clips and news cycle. So we caught up with Pete to talk about what happened that day, the strange experience of becoming the face of a story he never expected to be part of, and what it was like to eventually get back to the skiing that got him here in the first place.
Video by: Matt Norris
Behind-The-Scenes Footage