A 73-year-old British man died and seven other people were seriously injured after a plane encountered severe turbulence during a flight from London to Singapore, officials said Tuesday.
The plane, a Boeing 777-300ER operated by Singapore Airlines, was diverted to Bangkok, the airline said. said in a statementand landed on Tuesday at 3:45 p.m. local time.
A total of 30 people, including passengers and crew members, were injured, authorities said. The airline said in its statement that 18 people were hospitalized and 12 others were being treated for injuries. “Other passengers and crew members are being examined and treated, if necessary, at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport,” the airline said.
The man died on board the plane, Bangkok Airport Director Kittipong Kittikachorn said, without identifying him by name or giving the cause of death. The man’s wife was injured and taken to hospital, Mr Kittipong said.
The flight, which had 211 passengers and 18 crew members on board, left Heathrow Airport on Monday. The exact number of people injured on board was still under investigation, according to a statement from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport.
Rescuers transported the injured to hospitals, the airport said, and set up a waiting area for the plane’s passengers who were not injured.
The average flight time on this route is just under 13 hours. Mr Kittipong told a news conference he boarded the plane after it landed and described the scene as “a mess”.
The flight, SQ321, took off from Heathrow on Monday at 10:38 p.m. local time. Data on Flight Radar 24, a website that compiles public flight information, seems to show that about 11 hours later it went from cruising at 37,000 feet to an altitude of about 31,000 feet in just a few minutes.
About 100 uninjured passengers were expected to be flown to Singapore on Tuesday, Kittipong said. He described them as being in shock.
It is unclear what exactly caused this episode. As the plane crossed Myanmar, satellite data showed that a strong storm began to form and bubble into the higher elevations, suggesting the region’s atmosphere was becoming unstable. The plane was also heading toward other storms developing along Myanmar’s coast.
Deaths caused by turbulence are rare. Between 2009 and 2021, 146 passengers and crew members were seriously injured during turbulence, according to data from the Federal Aviation Administration. In December 2022, 11 people were seriously injured in turbulence on Phoenix-Honolulu flight.
José Alvarado, a pilot with Icelandic airline Play, said that in his experience, clear-air turbulence, which occurs most often at high altitudes, can occur without warning. For this reason, he told passengers, “even if there is no turbulence, keep your seat belts on.”
More than twenty years ago, while working as a flight attendant, he encountered turbulence so severe on a flight from Madrid to Buenos Aires that he was thrown upward when the plane suddenly fell. about 4,000 feet. His back and shoulder blades hit the cabin ceiling before he was thrown to the ground.
“I was bouncing up and down,” he said, adding that some passengers were also injured. He said he hasn’t experienced anything like that since.
Chee Hong Tat, Singapore’s transport minister, said in a statement that he was “deeply saddened to learn of the incident.”
Singapore Airlines offered its condolences to the family of the person who died on the flight, adding: “We deeply apologize for the traumatic experience our passengers and crew members endured on this flight.”
Judson Jones And Jenny Gross reports contributed.
