By Benjamin Katz in London, Jon Emont in Singapore and Feliz Solomon in Bangkok
A Singapore Airlines flight that was jolted by air movement, leading to one death and more than 100 injuries, was one of the worst turbulence-related accidents in history, aviation experts said.
The frequency of such accidents is likely to increase as a result of climate change, aviation experts and officials said.
On Wednesday, nearly 60 people from Flight SQ321 remained in the hospital, with 20 in intensive care. Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said that the country's Transport Safety Investigation Bureau will investigate the incident. Singapore Airlines hasn't disclosed the cause of the turbulence.
The jet, a Boeing 777-300ER, hit severe turbulence Tuesday about 10 hours into a flight from London to Singapore as it was flying over the Irrawaddy Basin, a storm-heavy region of Southeast Asia. The plane rose 400 feet and then fell the same distance within a minute, according to data from Flightradar24, before beginning a descent into Bangkok.
Passengers were flung from their seats. Oxygen masks dropped. A 73-year-old British national, Geoff Kitchen, died. Kitchen had a history of heart problems and likely died of cardiac arrest, the general manager of Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport said.
The death was the first on a commercial flight involving heavy turbulence in almost three decades, according to Paul Hayes, head of safety at aviation data firm Cirium. The previous fatality recorded on Cirium's database was in 1997 and involved a United Airlines 747 when a pilot inadvertently flew into a bout of undetected turbulence during a meal service. One passenger died, and another 18 crew and passengers were injured.
"This should be a wake-up call for industry, for regulators," said Hassan Shahidi, president and chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, an advocacy group that has warned that changing weather patterns are likely to increase the frequency and scale of turbulence.
Nearly half of the 229 people on the Singapore Airlines flight received medical treatment after landing in Bangkok, an unusually heavy toll for turbulence. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board recorded 101 serious turbulence injuries from 2013 to 2022. By contrast, 104 received medical treatment as a result of the Singapore Airlines flight.
On Wednesday, hospital officials in Bangkok said nine patients already had undergone surgery and were in stable condition. Another five were expected to have operations soon. They said 27 patients had been discharged.
"That's got to be the worst severe turbulence encounter I've ever heard of," said Byron Bailey, an aviation consultant with decades of experience flying commercial and military planes. "What worries me are the injuries where someone's thrown up against the ceiling."
Bailey, who has flown similar routes many times, said the Bay of Bengal is a major incubator for thunderstorms. Pilots scan with radar to detect storms ahead to give them a wide berth. He said it was nonetheless possible to get caught in one, though he would have expected the seat belt sign to come on in advance.
One passenger on the flight, Andrew Davies from London, said the seat-belt sign came on immediately before the plane began plunging, giving passengers little time to buckle up.
Singapore Airlines didn't respond to a request for comment.
The rapid movement would have thrust a person weighing 200 pounds against the cabin's ceiling, held them there with a force of nearly 600 pounds, and then thrown them back down with a force of between 300 and 450 pounds, according to estimates based on the Flightradar24 data by Joel Sercel, an aerospace engineer and the chief executive of aerospace firm, TransAstra. That would equate to a peak G-force of 3.85 in both directions, more than an astronaut would typically experience during a rocket launch.
Turbulence is most commonly caused by phenomena such as jet streams, wakes created by aircraft movements and thunderstorms, according to Marco Chan, a former pilot and lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University in England. Aviation experts said thunderstorms might have played a role in Tuesday's accident.
Another type is known as clear-air turbulence, which is triggered by the clashing of two air masses. Regulators have warned that clear-air turbulence is particularly concerning because it isn't typically detected by aircraft radars and isn't visible to pilots.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has warned that turbulence is expected to increase as weather patterns change in response to climate change. That includes the scale and frequency of clean-air turbulence and turbulence resulting from changes in the size and distribution of thunderstorms, hail and lightning.
Dan DePodwin, senior director of forecasting operations at AccuWeather, said satellite imagery showed there was rapid thunderstorm development when the plane was over southern Myanmar. "It appears to have occurred very close to, or maybe directly in front of the flight path of the plane," DePodwin said. "The thunderstorm development is just so rapid, that sometimes pilots don't have a chance to react to it."
Scientists at the University of Reading in the U.K. last year found that at a single point across the North Atlantic -- one of the busiest air traffic routes -- the duration of severe turbulence had increased 55% between 1979 and 2020.
In the U.S. last week, Congress passed a bill that included a provision requiring the Federal Aviation Administration to enhance its monitoring and understanding of severe turbulence to help address the impact of climate change and specifically the impact from clear-air turbulence.
"Turbulence is the number one cause of injuries to airline passengers and flight crews," Rep. Haley Stevens (D., Mich.) said last year after introducing the provision. "As climate change's effects become more severe, further research is desperately needed."
An FAA spokesman said the agency would work to implement that provision of the law. U.S. air-safety regulators have a history of working with airlines to avoid injuries from turbulence, including helping to develop a system with rapidly updated turbulence forecasts so pilots and airline dispatchers can avoid it.
For passengers on the Singapore Airlines, the extreme force was terrifying. Davies, the 54-year-old passenger from London, said breakfast was about to be served when the seat belt sign came on and the plane plunged. "It was such an awful shock," said Davies, who buckled in just in time. When the turbulence stopped, Davies heard screaming, looked around and saw a woman covered in blood.
He went to the galley several times to get water for injured passengers and saw "absolute carnage," he said. "Plates and things all over the floor, wine bottles all over the floor, smashed, there was glass, it was quite a scene." Many people were nursing what looked like severe wounds.
Passengers should pay attention when pilots activate seat belt signs, said Bruce Landsberg, a pilot who was acting chairman of the NTSB when it published a 2021 report on turbulence. "Even if you need to recline and sort of stretch out a little bit and you want to loosen it up a little bit, that's OK," Landsberg said. "But whenever you're in your seat, keep the belt fastened."
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Andrew Tangel in Minneapolis
contributed to this article
Write to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com, Jon Emont at jonathan.emont@wsj.com and Feliz Solomon at feliz.solomon@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 22, 2024 13:50 ET (17:50 GMT)
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