A Delta Air Lines regional jet flipped upside down upon landing at Canada's Toronto Pearson Airport amid windy weather following a snowstorm, injuring 18 of the 80 people on board, officials said.

Three people on Monday's flight DL4819 from Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport suffered critical injuries, among them a child, a Canadian air ambulance official said, with 15 others also immediately taken to hospitals.

Some of the injured have since been released, Delta said, and flights at the airport have already resumed.

The US carrier said a CRJ900 aircraft operated by its Endeavor Air subsidiary was involved in a single-aircraft accident with 76 passengers and four crew members on board.

The 16-year-old CRJ900 can seat up to 90 people. At least one of the two wings was no longer attached to the plane, videos show after the accident.

Canadian authorities said they would investigate the cause of the crash, which was not yet known, as well as the missing wing.

Passenger John Nelson posted a video of the aftermath on Facebook, showing a fire engine spraying water on the plane that was lying belly-up on the snow-covered tarmac.

He said there was no indication of anything unusual before landing.

"We hit the ground, and we were sideways, and then we were upside down," Nelson said.

"I was able to just unbuckle and sort of fall and push myself to the ground. And then some people were kind of hanging and needed some help being helped down, and others were able to get down on their own."

Another passenger said said when he took off his seat belt he crashed onto the ceiling, which had become the floor. He smelled gas, saw aviation fuel cascading down the cabin windows.

Once he got out of the plane, he dropped onto the tarmac. Snow was blowing and it "felt like I was stepping onto tundra."

Toronto Pearson Airport said earlier on Monday it was dealing with high winds reaching 51 kilometers per hour and frigid temperatures down to minus 8.6 degrees Celsius as airlines attempted to catch up with missed flights after a weekend snowstorm dumped more than 22 centimeters of snow at the airport.

The Delta plane touched down in Toronto at 2.13pm after an 86-minute flight and came to rest near the intersection of runway 23 and runway 15, not far from the start of the runway, FlightRadar24 data showed.

Three previous cases of planes flipping over on landing involved McDonnell Douglas's MD-11 model. In 2009, a FedEx freighter turned over on landing at Tokyo's Narita airport killing both pilots. In 1999, a China Airlines flight inverted at Hong Kong, killing three of 315 occupants. In 1997, another FedEx freighter flipped over at Newark with no fatalities.

The crash in Canada followed other recent crashes in North America.

An Army helicopter collided with a CRJ-700 passenger jet in Washington, DC, killing 67 people, while at least seven people died when a medical transport plane crashed in Philadelphia and 10 were killed in a passenger plane crash in Alaska.

Reuters, Associated Press

A Delta Air Lines plane is seen upside down after a crash at the Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Canada, as people at the facility subsequently wait for delayed arrivals. Xinhua, AFP

Passengers flip upside down with Delta jet amid high winds