 "‘Bleeding ears, loud screams’: How 5 minutes of turbulence on Singapore Airlines plane left 1 dead, 71 hurt")
“The thing I remember the most is seeing objects and things flying through the air. I was covered in coffee. It was incredibly severe turbulence,” said Britain’s Andrew Davis as he recounts the horrific scenes that unfolded on board a Singapore Airlines flight after it encountered turbulence, killing one person and injuring 71 others.
Passengers on board Singapore Airlines Flight SQ321, which had taken off from London’s Heathrow Airport, experienced extreme turbulence around 11,300 metres (37,000 feet) over Myanmar, during which it violently rose and plunged several times.
Such was the severity that pilots requested for an emergency landing at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport where the airline’s team extended support and aid the 211 passengers and 18 crew members.
Breakfast turns bloody
The Boeing 777-300ER aircraft, travelling from London to Singapore, was in the midst of its breakfast routine when all hell broke loose and chaos reigned. Ten hours into the journey, the plane encountered sudden extreme turbulence over the Irrawaddy Basin at 37,000 feet.
Flight Radar 24, a website that compiles public information about flights, appears to show that about 10 hours later, the plane went from 37,000 feet to an altitude of roughly 31,000 feet in only a few minutes.
One of the passengers on board the plane, Dzafran Azmir from Malaysia, paints a picture of what exactly happened midair. The student said that he got the feeling that the plane was tilting upwards and beginning to shake. He immediately put on his seatbelt, recounting that many on board did not.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts“Suddenly there was a very dramatic drop so everyone seated and not wearing a seatbelt was launched immediately into the ceiling, some people hit their heads on the baggage cabins overhead and dented it, they hit the places where lights and masks are and broke straight through it,” Azmir told Reuters.
“People dropped to the ground, my phone flew out of my hand and went a couple aisles to the side, people’s shoes flung about.”
Another passenger, Andrew Davies said the seatbelt sign was turned on moments before the plane dropped. “So many injured people, head lacerations, bleeding ears,” he wrote on X, adding that a female passenger was screaming in pain.
People’s belongings were scattered, with coffee and water splattered on the ceiling.
Allison Barker told the BBC that her son, Josh, messaged her from the flight, saying: “I don’t want to scare you, but I’m on a crazy flight. The plane is making an emergency landing… I love you all.”
Teandra Tukhunen, who was on the plane, told Sky News that she was asleep and “woken up because I was thrown to the roof and then to the floor”. She said when the seatbelt sign came on “pretty much immediately, straight after that I was flung to the roof, before I had time to put my seatbelt on unfortunately”.
“It was just so quick, over in a couple of seconds and then you’re just shocked. Everyone’s pretty freaked out.”
Another passenger describing the horror told the BBC that “some poor people who were walking around ended up doing somersaults”.
Azmir later added that it was the crew and people inside the lavatories who were hurt the most. “We discovered people just on the ground not able to get up. There were a lot of spinal and head injuries,” he told Reuters.
One dead, over 71 injured
The pilots of the Singapore Airlines Flight SQ321 then requested for an emergency landing at Thailand’s Suvarnabhumi Airport from where the injured were rushed to a hospital for treatment.
Suvarnabhumi Airport said in a statement, “At 3:35 pm the airport received a distress call from the Singapore Airlines flight saying there were passengers on board injured by turbulence, and requesting an emergency landing. The plane landed at the airport and the medical team was sent to treat all the injured.”
The director of Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, Kittipong Kittikachorn, was quoted as telling AFP that most of the injured passengers on the flight suffered blows to the head.
**Also read: Buckle Up: Can air turbulence cause deaths?**While 71 passengers received treatment, the airline also confirmed the death of a 73-year-old on board, who was later identified as Geoff Kitchen from Britain. It has been reported that Kitchen was on a six-week holiday with his wife to Singapore, Indonesia and Australia.
In a post on Facebook, Thornbury Musical Theatre Group paid tribute to Kitchen: “It is with a heavy heart that we learn of the devastating news of the passing of our esteemed colleague and friend Geoff Kitchen in the recent Singapore Air Incident.
“Geoff was always a gentleman with the utmost honesty and integrity and always did what was right for the group. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his wife and the family at this difficult time, and we ask that you respect their privacy.”
Kittikachorn, the head of Bangkok airport, said earlier that the 73-year-old died from a probable cardiac arrest.
Following the incident, Singapore Airlines CEO Goh Choon Phong said that they were “very sorry for the traumatic experience” that everyone on board the flight, SQ321, went through on Tuesday.
“On behalf of Singapore Airlines, I would like to express my deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of the deceased. We are very sorry for the traumatic experience that everyone on board SQ321 went through,” Phong said.
Trouble in the air
According to aviation experts, the SQ321 likely encountered clear air turbulence (CAT), which is not visible on a jet’s weather radar. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) website, clear air turbulence is air movement created by atmospheric pressure, jet streams, air around mountains, cold or warm weather fronts or thunderstorms.
As the plane travelled across Myanmar, satellite data showed a strong storm beginning to form and bubble into the higher elevations, which suggests that the atmosphere in the region was becoming unstable. The plane was also moving toward other storms that were developing along the coast of Myanmar.
Aviation experts note that death by turbulence is rare; the FAA data shows that 30 passengers and 116 crew members have been seriously injured due to turbulence from 2009 to 2021. Airline passenger numbers are currently estimated to be at around four billion a year, so such incidents are clearly still rare.
However, a study has shown that severe turbulence has increased by 55 per cent in the past four decades due to the impact of climate change.
Buckle up
Flight attendants, pilots and aviation insiders say that the one lesson that this episode can teach flyers is to fasten their seatbelt during the flight.
The Air Line Pilots Association said the safest way for passengers to protect themselves is by making sure their seatbelts are always fastened. This was also echoed by Aerospace safety expert Anthony Brickhouse, who said passengers need to minimise their movement on flights and always stay buckled in, regardless of the seatbelt light.
With inputs from agencies
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