Deadly Turbulence
May 28, 2024
LAST WEEK, a passenger died and multiple more injured when a Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 encountered severe turbulence while en route from London to Singapore. The encounter happened over Myanmar and the flight diverted to Bangkok. Then, on May 26th, twelve people were hurt when a Qatar Airways jet hit severe turbulence during a flight to Dublin.
The media is off and running, no doubt triggering panic among the many flyers for whom turbulence is an acute fear.
If you’re one of those people, the first thing I can do is refer you to the turbulence essay found in the Q&A section of this website. You can read it here.
The second is to emphasize the rarity of incidents like this one. Any turbulence encounter powerful enough to hurt scores of people and tear away ceiling panels and overhead lockers, is a frightening prospect. And as climate change intensifies weather patterns and creates more powerful storms, we may see more of them. But they are, and should remain, exceptionally uncommon.
And maybe most important of all, it’s been reported that most, and possibly all, of the injured passengers were not wearing seatbelts. If you’re belted in, even the worst turbulence is unlikely to cause harm. Keep your belt on anytime you’re seated. Crews will often make a PA reminding you to keep your belt on on anytime you’re seated. This is a good example why.
We should also mention that the man who passed away on the Singapore flight died from a heart attack, not from any sort of impact trauma caused by the turbulence directly.
Prior to last week, if I’m counting right, the most recent turbulence-related fatality on a commercial jet occurred in 2009. Before that, a passenger was killed aboard a United Airlines flight in 1997. That’s two or three deaths in a roughly 25-year span, during which close to thirty billion — with a b — passengers traveled by air, aboard tens of millions of flights. Try to let those numbers sink in. This is the kind of thing even the most frequent flyer (or pilot) won’t experience in a lifetime.
What happened is unfortunate and scary, but it’s not a reason to freak out and cancel your flight because the turbulence app on your iPhone shows yellow.
The media focus, meanwhile, has been relentless. An accident in which one person died has received as much attention as a disaster that killed 200 people once would have. That’s not an exaggeration; I can remember when major crashes, in other parts of the world, would be buried on the second or third page of the newspaper. Most people didn’t even know they occurred.
This is one of those “for better or worse” things. It’s precisely because of how rare crashes have become that we hyper-focus on the smaller stories.
Related Stories:
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TURBULENCE.
SAFETY IN PERSPECTIVE
Photos by the author.
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13 Responses to “Deadly Turbulence”
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Turbulence. This has always been in the skies above our heads since man first walked on the planet and before. Its nothing new the only new item is the fact that man now flies above the ground in it. All land based motorists would call it the ‘pot holes in the sky’ to be avoided at all costs, but when you fly you can’t see it its invisible you may have an indication from cloud formations in the distance in front of you. The best thing we can all do is wear our seat belt unless we need to use the rest room facilities when we fly, after all we wear a seat belt in a car when on the move so why not an aeroplane it could save you from a serious injury if we hit a rough spot on our flight.
I always wear my seatbelt when flying. Why not? Should be mandatory, not just “suggested.” I’m so accustomed to wearing a seatbelt in a moving vehicle that it feels weird to not wear it when on a plane.
Why, if there is a simple answer, are seatbelts not required to be worn ( when seated) for the entire flight? It is always ‘suggested’, but not required.
40 years of flying and I can only remember three or four bad turbulence experiences – only one of which was not predicted. None of them did damage but had pax not been strapped in the results might have been different.
I can’t help but notice that every article namechecks Boeing whenever *anything* happens involving a Boeing aircraft, even when the incident has nothing to do with the plane itself. I’m the first person to bemoan Boeing’s loss of its safety culture, but these journalistic jabs are completely idiotic.
I’ve wondered what impact these types of severe turbulence have on the airplanes themselves – can a plane be significantly damaged? Although they seem to come out of these disturbances relatively intact, that would be my primary concern.
“Can you explain how climate change is making more powerful stoms? I thought climate change is making droughts, which means there are no stoms.”
Read more (no politics) and you will easily learn that climate change is complicated, and no one has all the answers.
Climate change is causing droughts, floods, storms, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels.
Certainly no answer can be summed up in a sentence or two.
Turbulence app? Who knew?! I took a look in the App Store and saw a bunch of different ones. But none would be able to predict clear-air turbulence, such as that which befell the Singapore Airlines’ flight, isn’t that right?
Hi Patrick. Please don’t refer to the passenger as being “killed” by the turbulence. You’re not helping. The man died from a heart attack. It may well have been caused by the turbulance but to say he was “killed” by the turbulence is misleading and incorrect.
This is a fair point. I’ve amended the article.
Can you explain how climate change is making more powerful stoms? I thought climate change is making droughts, which means there are no stoms.
I am quite confused, and I am afraid of flying now that more CO2 is out to get us.
As much as I’m a fearful flyer and hate turbulence, thanks to years of following your’s and other pilots’ blogs (and tweets): For better or for worst, one of my first thoughts when I heard of the death and injuries on the Singapore Airlines flight was “were they wearing their seatbelts?”
Typical media over-reaction. Good idea pointing out the data that show how unusual severe turbulence is. Im guessing pilots will be having FA’s seated more often. Do you think that is warranted? Is there any data that tracks turbulence and whether there is an increase in recent years? Climate change gets blamed for practically any anomaly these days, so don’t count on the media for accurate information.