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