Pete Koukov says that when his flight from Minneapolis was about to touch down in Toronto, everything seemed fine.
And then just like that, he thought he was going to die.
Koukov was one of the 80 people who walked away from the wreckage of February’s Delta Flight 4819. It was his extraordinary video that revealed to the world just how devastating the crash had been and how lucky all the passengers were to survive.
At least 244 million people on Instagram have watched the clip, watching him clamber out of the plane, stepping down onto the snowy runway and turning to reveal the inverted fuselage that had been shorn of both wings.
“Holy f**k!” he exclaims in the video, “Oh my f**king God. Yo, I was just on this f**king plane!”
As a professional content creator, Koukov said that the decision to film his experience came to him instinctively and, as a skier, it just so happens that he’s very familiar with high-risk situations.
“I was almost the best person to be taking a video in that situation,” he told CNN Sports, apologizing for his choice of words heard on the video. “Because we film each other all the time, you get really good at it when your hands are cold, you get pretty good at pulling (the camera) out quick. Although I was in a very stressful situation, it wasn’t anything that I knew I wasn’t able to do, and I knew this was an insane event in my life and I made sure there was a recording of it.”
It was only when he saw the exterior of the plane that he felt as though he was safe.
“There were moments of ‘Are we going to blow up? Is there going to be a fire?’ Until I was off the plane, that’s when it was like ‘OK, I can breathe,’” he said.
Koukov is no stranger to finding himself in tight spots or being upside down. His social media feed shows him street skiing, a niche genre that is best described as a cross between skateboarding, parkour and alpine sports. He skis over urban structures and through tiny gaps that are in his path.
In 2023, he posted a video of him skiing down the steep side of a church building in South Dakota – he wrote that climbing up it was “the scariest thing I’ll ever do.”
Those experiences have led him to be a sort of jack-of-all-trades when it comes to content creation.
“Skiing is such like a niche and it’s so small that you kind of do – even if you’re an athlete – you kind of do more than just being an athlete, whether it’s filming, editing, producing, directing,” he told CNN. “You kind of learn how to do it all, and it’s always something I’ve really enjoyed and wanted to do more outside of skiing.”
While he wouldn’t quite describe himself as an adrenaline junkie, he admits that he’s attracted to recreational risks – “and that’s what kind of makes it fun.”
But now that he’s starred in the ultimate adrenaline video, he can’t quite reconcile his role in it.
“It almost feels like a separate world,” he explained, detailing his experience of watching another video of the crash-landing on the runway. “I’ll even see the side-view perspective and it’s really hard for me to put myself (there) and be, like, ‘I was actually on that plane.’
“It doesn’t really translate. It doesn’t really make sense to me. It was hard to believe while it was happening, and it’s even hard to believe now.”
Koukov was heading to Toronto on a one-way ticket to shoot content for the skiing magazine Browser, but a back injury sustained in the accident means he’s been advised to stay off his skis for a while. He doesn’t anticipate that the crash will change his approach to skiing or its inherent risks, but he admits that flying will never be the same again.
“I travel a lot for skiing,” he said, “And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to feel the same again, that’s for sure.”
Because he couldn’t ski in Toronto, Koukov made the decision to quickly return home to Denver, a decision that he believes made it easier to face his fears because it didn’t leave him any time to let the experience sink in.
“If I had waited the original three weeks, I think maybe it would have been worse,”
he said.
But perhaps he’s already equipped to cope with the mental trauma of his experience. Koukov has been embracing risky sports like skiing and mountain biking since he was young.
“It’s a challenge to overcome something, that’s why we do it. You land something you didn’t necessarily think you could do, and nothing really beats that feeling. It’s good to scare yourself!” he said.
In 1898, the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote an oft-quoted line, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Koukov told CNN Sports he hadn’t heard the quote before, but after musing on it for a moment, he put the sentiment into his own words.
“It’s a pretty neat feeling to feel like I should have died and didn’t. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good feeling or not. It’s a grateful feeling,” he said.
“I’m not saying that the tricks I do on skis are deadly by any means, but there’s always consequence, and I’ve always kind of gravitated towards the fact that there’s consequence, and that’s what makes it enjoyable.”
