The Singapore Airlines flight which left a 73-year-old Brit dead dropped 178 feet in just four seconds, an investigation has found.
The severe turbulence caused the plane to experience a ‘rapid change in gravitational force’, resulting in dozens of injuries.
Passengers recalled being slammed into the ceiling before the plane made an emergency landing in Bangkok, Thailand.
The Transport Safety Investigation Bureau said: ‘The vertical acceleration changed from negative 1.5G to positive 1.5G within 4 seconds. This likely resulted in the occupants who were airborne to fall back down.
‘The rapid changes in G over the 4.6 seconds duration resulted in an altitude drop of 178ft (54m), from 37,362ft to 37,184ft. This sequence of events likely caused the injuries to the crew and passengers.’
Passenger Geoff Kitchen, from Bristol, died of a suspected heart attack after the terrifying turbulence.
He had been on the trip of a lifetime with his wife, headed to Singapore, Australia and Indonesia for six weeks.
The aircraft, which was carrying 229 people, fell from 38,000ft to 31,000ft over the west coast of Burma, sending passengers hurling into ‘somersaults’ as they hit the plane’s ceiling.
11 hours into the 13-hour flight after taking off from Heathrow, passengers have told they had little to not warning to put their seatbelts as the aircraft suddenly dropped.
Passenger Jerry, who was travelling to his son’s wedding, told the BBC the day was ‘the worst of my life’.
Speaking with a bandage covering part of his head, he said: ‘Things were going very smoothly at first. I’d just been to the loo, came back, sat down, bit of turbulence, and suddenly the plane plunged.
Days after the terrifying instance on the Singapore Airlines flight, twelve people were injured on a flight from Qatar to Ireland which hit turbulence flying over Turkey, with emergency services meeting the plane on the tarmac at Dublin Airport.
There are general four types of turbulence, caused by different things.
Some can be caused by ‘waves’ of air, which form upon contact with mountains or buildings and hit aircraft ‘like ocean waves crashing onto a beach’, which again can be anticipated due to the topography around.
‘Clear-air’ turbulence is as the name suggests harder to see, as there are no telltale clouds around.
It can be caused by jet streams, with a vertical movement which may come without warning so passengers would not be back in their seats. Thermal (convective) turbulence is also invisible and caused when there is uneven heating of the earth’s surface, often on warm days.
The final type known as ‘wake turbulence’ is produced by aircrafts themselves, as a result of the aircraft producing lift, according to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
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