Delta Jet Clips Parked Air Canada Plane at LAX; No Injuries Confirmed, FAA Investigating

LOS ANGELES — Two jets made contact on the ground at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday morning, in the kind of slow-motion collision that stops an airport's heart even when nobody is hurt. Delta Air Lines Flight 7 was taxiing for departure when its left wingtip clipped the horizontal stabilizer of Air Canada Flight 875, which was being towed and had stopped short of its gate, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The Delta plane's left wing was damaged in the contact. No injuries were confirmed, and the FAA said it is investigating.

The incident was captured on aerial footage by local television, and KTLA's Rich Prickett walked viewers through what the images showed: the Delta plane on the taxiway and the Air Canada plane at least partially at one of the gates, with the Delta jet's winglet appearing to go into the horizontal stabilizer of the Air Canada aircraft. KTLA's own verified social channels carried the station's breaking aerial report, showing the two large jets on the tarmac — the Delta aircraft with its distinctive livery and the Air Canada jet with its red maple leaf tail. The station said authorities including airport police and the fire department responded to the scene but had since left, and that no one had been seen deboarding either aircraft.

The most vivid account came from a passenger with a window seat at exactly the wrong moment. Jayson Lowe, CEO of Ascendant Financial Inc., was aboard a different flight that had just landed at LAX and was taxiing to its arrival gate when the collision happened. "I was looking out the window as we were taxiing to our arrival gate and a Delta A350 managed to hit a parked Air Canada plane. A parked plane. I cannot stress this enough," Lowe wrote in a social media post. He added that "somebody in that Delta cockpit lost spatial awareness near an object roughly the size of a condominium building with wings." A separate planespotter video posted from the tarmac showed a Delta Airbus A350 — registration N512DN visible — positioned close to an Air Canada Boeing 777, with ground crew in high-visibility vests and airport vehicles gathered around the aircraft.

FOX 11 Los Angeles, reporting on the incident from its own aerial coverage, said the contact happened around 10:44 a.m. and that the Air Canada aircraft was being moved with a tug attached at the time. The station said there were no injuries, no fire and no fuel leak, and that L.A. City Fire and the FAA were investigating. At the time of the early reporting, officials had not said whether passengers were aboard either aircraft or who was responsible — the facts that typically take the longest to establish in a ground collision.

The operational fallout was visible but contained. FlightAware showed 26 flights originating from LAX delayed and 2 cancelled as of 1 p.m. Tuesday. LAX traffic was under gate-hold and taxi delays of 15 minutes or less, with arriving aircraft facing airborne delays of 15 minutes or less — though it was unclear whether those delays were directly caused by the collision. Both aircraft remained on the ground after the contact, and no one was seen leaving either plane in the immediate aftermath, according to KTLA's aerial reporting.

Ground collisions between aircraft are rare but never routine, and Tuesday's contact at LAX arrives as federal investigators are still working through one of the worst runway collisions in recent American aviation history. On March 22, 2026, at 11:37 p.m. Eastern, Jazz Aviation LP Flight 646 — operating as Air Canada Express Flight 8646, a Bombardier CRJ-900 (registration C-GNJZ) arriving from Montréal-Trudeau — collided with Rescue 35, a Port Authority aircraft-rescue firefighting truck, while landing on runway 4 at LaGuardia Airport. The captain and first officer were fatally injured; of the 2 flight attendants, 72 passengers and 2 crew in the truck, 39 were transported to local hospitals and 6 serious injuries were confirmed, according to the NTSB's preliminary report (investigation DCA26MA161).

The LaGuardia investigation has already surfaced disturbing detail. The fire truck had been cleared to cross the runway when the airplane was a quarter mile out and about 130 feet up — but the truck started moving while the runway's red warning lights were still lit, the NTSB said, and a firefighter later told investigators he had heard the controller warn "stop, stop, stop" without knowing who the warning was for, according to the Associated Press. Because the truck carried no transponder, the airport's surface-monitoring system "did not predict a potential conflict" and generated no audio or visual alert, the agency said. The NTSB's preliminary findings called the alert failure an immediate area of concern; the final report is expected in 2027.

Tuesday's LAX contact is a different category of event — a low-speed wingtip clip on a taxiway rather than a landing collision at speed — and investigators will determine what happened in their own time. But the two incidents share a shape: a very large, very visible aircraft and a very large, very visible piece of the airport environment, in a space where everyone on the ground can see everything except, apparently, the six feet that matter. For now, the confirmed facts at LAX are the ones the images tell: two planes, one taxiway, and a wingtip that found the tail of an aircraft stopped at its gate. Everything else — who was at fault, whether anyone was aboard, how long the repairs will take — is what the FAA investigation will have to establish.

LAX travelers should expect normal airport friction through the afternoon: the FAA's delays were modest as of midday, and there was no indication of an airport-wide ground stop. But with two widebody aircraft out of service for inspection and a federal investigation underway, rebooking and schedule shuffles are the likely side effects — a reminder of how quickly an ordinary travel day can change shape. For more on what moved at LAX earlier this month, see the LAX spy arrest story, and keep an eye on the sports desk for tonight's NLDS Game 3.