By Stuart Condie in Sydney, Feliz Solomon in Bangkok and Jon Emont in Singapore
Ali Bukhari was still groggy from a midflight nap when he felt the plane plummet.
It wasn't the end he was expecting for his honeymoon.
The 27-year-old Australian engineer and his wife, Ramiza, had spent two idyllic weeks in Iceland -- a trip for which they had been saving since their wedding a couple of years ago. They had wanted to go somewhere extra special, Bukhari said. Getting back meant a lot of flying -- first to London, then Singapore and finally home to Sydney -- but they thought it would be worth it.
That changed 10 hours after their departure from London's Heathrow Airport. The Singapore Airlines plane they were on lurched, violently. An elderly man sitting in front of Bukhari was thrown through the air and across the aisle, slamming into the bank of seats running down the middle. Oxygen masks dropped, and so did some of the boxes that held them.
"My wife and I thought we were going to die," Bukhari said. "We didn't think we were going to make it."
Bukhari and his wife were unharmed; they had their seat belts on. But many others were badly hurt. Blood streaked down faces. Someone was pumping the chest of a man whose body lay on the floor, Bukhari said.
Just then, he had a frightening thought: What if something was wrong with the plane? He considered looking through a window for signs of external damage but resisted for fear of what he might see. Surely, turbulence couldn't cause that much harm, he thought.
It had. Singapore Airlines Flight SQ321 was caught in one of the worst turbulence-related accidents ever. A 73-year-old British national died, likely from cardiac arrest -- the first fatality on a commercial flight involving heavy turbulence in almost three decades, according to aviation data firm Cirium. As of Thursday, 104 passengers had received medical treatment in Bangkok, where the flight was diverted, and 20 remain in intensive-care units.
At one of the hospitals where many of the victims were taken, six were found to have skull and brain injuries, and 22 suffered injuries of the spine or spinal cord. Some patients have shown signs of paralysis, though it isn't yet known if the damage is permanent, said Dr. Adinun Kittiratanapaibool, director of Samitivej Srinakarin Hospital, a private medical facility. At least 17 have undergone surgery.
Keith Davis was adjusting his seat when he noticed his wife's water glass vibrating. He reached over to cover it, fearing a spill. The next thing he knew, they were both airborne, hurtling toward the ceiling, he said.
His wife crashed into an overhead luggage bin and then landed in the aisle. His head went straight through a ceiling panel and he landed back in his chair.
"I was in absolute shock," said Davis, a 59-year-old landscape architect from Adelaide, Australia.
He said the first thing he did was lean over his wife and ask if she was OK. "Then I realized I was dripping blood all over her," he said.
His wife, Kerry Jordan, is in an ICU but is stable and conscious. Davis had mostly superficial injuries -- a laceration along his hairline that caused a lot of bleeding, and a black eye -- and localized pain in his right shoulder.
In the chaotic moments after the incident, his biggest concern was keeping his wife still. He braced his legs around her to pin her in place and keep anyone from moving her until they reached safety, he said. The couple, who had been on vacation in the U.K., now just wants to get back home -- but that means getting on another plane.
"I'm not comfortable with it at all, it's horrifying," he said. "But there's no other way."
'A very nasty area'
The jolt seemed to come without much warning. About 15 minutes later, the pilot, visibly shaken, appeared to limp into the cabin and told passengers they'd experienced an unexpected turbulence event, Bukhari said. He looked even more troubled when he saw the man being given CPR, according to Bukhari.
The turbulence, lasting about a minute, left the cabin looking like the site of a hurricane. Food and drinks were splattered across the overhead luggage compartments. Some ceiling panels had fallen, causing the plane's innards -- jumbles of pipes and tubes -- to tumble out.
In corridors and in galleys where flight attendants prepare meals, food trays had slid out of racks. Strewn across the floor were packets of chips, bottles of water, broken wine glasses, cups of coffee, kettles, apples, sliced kiwi.
The flight from London to Singapore typically takes 13 hours. On Monday, it departed at 10:38 p.m. local time, flying southeast over Europe, through Central Asia and toward the Bay of Bengal, an area notorious among pilots for unpredictable weather. Storms were forming as the plane crossed southern Myanmar, according to satellite data analyzed by weather and aviation experts.
Just before 2:50 p.m. Bangkok time, the aircraft was pushed up around 400 feet before falling the same distance -- all in about a minute, according to data from Flightradar24, a flight-tracking service. Singapore Airlines said the plane encountered sudden extreme turbulence over the Irrawaddy River Basin, an area largely located in Myanmar.
It then steadied, and at around 3:05 p.m. began what Flightradar24 and other aviation experts called a controlled descent from 37,000 feet to 31,000 feet, before leveling off. About five minutes later, it began descending again, touching down in Bangkok at 3:45 p.m.
"Obviously they penetrated a very nasty area," said Byron Bailey, an aviation consultant and pilot who has flown similar routes many times. Once when flying over the Bay of Bengal, he remembers he was out of his seat checking on breakfast service. Upon returning, he noticed rapidly approaching thunderstorms that his co-pilot had missed.
Bailey said he immediately told the cabin crew to get everyone buckled in within two minutes. "It was very rough that day."
Pilots scan with radar to detect storms ahead and often try to maneuver around, Bailey said. The information is color-coded, with green indicating mild weather, such as light rain, and red meaning something severe, like heavy thunderstorms.
"You never go through red," he said. "Red is just real bad news."
Still, sometimes it's tough to avoid. Singapore Airlines hasn't provided any details about what caused the turbulence and what the pilots saw.
Singapore's Transport Safety Investigation Bureau said it was probing the incident.
Drew and Vicki Kessler were traveling with their two boys to Singapore for a Rotary International Convention. Drew, the 43-year-old treasurer for the global networking organization, said in an Instagram post The Wall Street Journal verified that his neck was broken from hitting the ceiling. His wife had broken her back and was in a lot of pain, he said. Their two sons, ages 8 and 12, had no medical issues.
Kessler shared a photo he took of a water bottle that had flown up with such force it got wedged between the aircraft's ceiling panels, right next to where he'd made impact. "Clearly things could have been worse and we feel blessed," he said.
'Sudden, sudden drop'
Andrew Davies, 54, had a window seat for the long-haul flight. Cabin attendants had just brought around beverages, suggesting to him that the pilot and crew weren't expecting the jolt to come. His neighbor's coffee was still warm.
Davies said the seat-belt sign went on just before the plunge. "It was a very sudden, sudden drop," he said. It seemed to end as abruptly as it began.
"There wasn't really enough time for me to think, 'Oh my days, is this going to stop?'" he said.
Moving around the aircraft to help the injured, Davies saw passengers scrambling in all directions, squeezing past one another. They had to weave through fallen objects, even people sprawled on the floor, he said.
A man in business class had a big cut on his head. Farther down, another holding his chest looked to be in extreme pain. A woman had hurt her back and was screaming in agony. A gash on the ear of another was bleeding onto her white shirt.
Davies and others moved an unconscious elderly man out of his seat, laying him down near an emergency door, where there was more space. A passenger with medical training called for a defibrillator, which a hobbling cabin-crew member brought over. They administered CPR for at least 20 minutes, and then someone said: "I think we need to stop," Davies recalled.
"That's my husband, that's my husband," his widow said repeatedly.
The man, Geoff Kitchen, was a longtime member of an amateur musical-theater group in southwest England. Thai authorities later said he had heart problems.
"Almost everybody on the airplane needed help at the same time," said Davies. "It was an impossible, very difficult situation."
Injured passengers were dispersed across three hospitals and one clinic in Bangkok, most of them at Samitivej Srinakarin Hospital.
The Bukharis were flown to Singapore before a seven-hour flight to Sydney, which they spent holding hands, watching a movie and trying to distract each other.
"We just kept visualizing that incident," said Bukhari. "It was replaying in the head over and over again throughout the next two flights."
They were greeted at Sydney Airport by Bukhari's parents and his wife's mother, with other family members joining them after the 45-minute drive home.
"I've never had any sort of fear of flying. But I can honestly say that I'm now afraid to fly," Bukhari said.
Write to Stuart Condie at stuart.condie@wsj.com, Feliz Solomon at feliz.solomon@wsj.com and Jon Emont at jonathan.emont@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 23, 2024 08:36 ET (12:36 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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