One passenger was killed and 30 injured after a Singapore Airlines flight hit severe turbulence on Tuesday, flinging passengers and crew around the cabin and forcing the plane to land in Bangkok, officials and the airline said.
The flight from London and bound for Singapore fell into an air pocket while cabin crew were serving breakfast before it encountered turbulence, prompting the pilots to request an emergency landing, Bangkok Suvarnabhumi airport general manager Kittipong Kittikachorn told a press conference.
Photographs from the interior of the plane showed large gashes in the overhead cabin panels, gas masks and panels hanging from the ceiling and items of hand luggage strewn around. A passenger said some people’s heads had slammed into the lights above the seats and punctured the panels.
A 73-year-old British man died during the incident, likely due to a heart attack, Kittikachorn said. Seven people were critically injured, some with head injuries. He added people were calm as they were led from the plane.
Eighteen people have been hospitalised and 12 are being treated in hospitals, Singapore Airlines said. The carrier has sent a team of 50 people to help take care of the injured at the hospital, Kittikachorn added.
“Singapore Airlines offers its deepest condolences to the family of the deceased. We deeply apologise for the traumatic experience that our passengers and crew members suffered on this flight,” the airline said.
It was not immediately possible to reconstruct the incident from publicly available tracking data, but a spokesperson for FlightRadar 24 said it was analysing data at around 07:49 GMT which shows the plane tilting upwards and returning to its cruising altitude over the space of a minute.
A passenger who was on the flight told Reuters that the incident involved the sensation of rising and then falling.
“Suddenly the aircraft starts tilting up and there was shaking so I started bracing for what was happening, and very suddenly there was a very dramatic drop so everyone seated and not wearing a seatbelt was launched immediately into the ceiling,” Dzafran Azmir, a 28-year-old student on board the flight told Reuters.
“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,” he said.
Kittikachorn said most of the passengers he had spoken to had been wearing their seatbelts.
The spokesperson for FlightRadar 24 said about 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.”
The Boeing 777-300ER plane had 211 passengers and 18 crew when it made the emergency landing, the airline said.
Suvarnabhumi airport said the plane requested an emergency landing at 3:35pm local time (8:35am GMT) and landed at 3:51pm. Uninjured passengers disembarked and another aircraft will fly them onwards. The airline said it landed at 3:45pm.
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.
Singapore Airlines, which is widely recognised as one of the 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 October 31, 2000, into construction equipment at the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport after attempting to take off from the wrong runway. The crash killed 83 of the 179 people on board.
Singapore Airlines has had seven accidents according to records by the Aviation Safety Network.
Boeing said it was in touch with Singapore Airlines and was ready to provide support. It referred further questions to the airline and local authorities.
“We extend our deepest condolences to the family who lost a loved one, and our thoughts are with the passengers and crew,” it said.
Singapore’s Transport Safety Investigation Bureau will be deploying investigators to Bangkok to look into the incident.
Turbulence-related airline accidents are the most common type, according to a 2021 study by the National Transportation Safety Board.
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