Bangkok: One passenger died and 30 sustained injuries in a London-Singapore flight of Singapore Airlines (SIAL.SI) after it was caught in a severe turbulence on Tuesday. The turbulence was so high that made the pilots to land the place in Bangkok in an emergency situation, officials of the airline said.
The long-haul flight of Singapore Airlines fell into an air pocket at a time when cabin crew members were serving breakfast. The turbulence occurred over the Irrawaddy Basin in Myanmar about 10 hours into the flight, the airline said.
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Chaos prevailed in the flight after it underwent a series of shocks, forcing the pilot to declare medical emergency after one of its passengers was suspected to have died due to heart attack. The plane landed at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International airport.
Interior view of the ill-fated plane showed large gashes in the overhead cabin panels, gas masks and panels hanging from the ceiling and items of hand luggage strewn around. Some passengers slammed the overhead lights with their heads and punctured the panels.
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Suvarnabhumi International airport general manager Kittipong Kittikachorn told the media that he saw things lying everywhere and many air crew injured with bruising. “Critically injured passengers and crew had been evacuated,” he said.
“A 73-year-old British man died during the incident possibly due to a heart attack. Seven people were critically injured, some with head injuries,” said Kittikachorn.
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Media reports said that as many as 71 passengers, including six who were severely injured, were being treated at Samitivej Hospital. “It was not immediately possible to reconstruct the incident from publicly available tracking data,” said a spokesperson for FlightRadar 24. He said that primary analysis of the data hinted that the plane tilting upwards and return to its cruising altitude over the space of a minute.
The spokesperson for FlightRadar 24 said regarding data showing a drop in height, “our initial thinking is the turbulence event is prior to the standard descent from 37,000 to 31,000 feet. That appears to just be a flight level change in preparation for landing.”
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Suvarnabhumi airport said the plane requested an emergency landing at 3:35 p.m. local time (0835 GMT) and landed at 3:51 p.m. Uninjured passengers disembarked and an another aircraft will fly them onwards.
Turbulence
Turbulence-related airline accidents are the most common type, according to a 2021 study by the National Transportation Safety Board. From 2009 through 2018, the US agency found that turbulence accounted for more than a third of reported airline accidents and most resulted in one or more serious injuries, but no aircraft damage.
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Singapore Airlines, which is widely recognized as one of world’s leading airlines and is a benchmark for much of the industry, has not had any major incidents in recent years. Its last accident resulting in casualties was a flight from Singapore to Los Angeles via Taipei, where it crashed on Oct. 31, 2000, into construction equipment on the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport after attempting to take off from the wrong runway. The crash killed 83 of the 179 people on board.
