Deadly turbulence on Singapore Airlines: How it happened | About That

Imagine that you are on a long flight of almost 11 hours, you are sitting having breakfast, you are not wearing your seatbelt because you want to be comfortable when suddenly the entire plane falls, it is like that feeling of going down the steep part of a roller coaster, everything is just It kind of goes up your throat, except it's worse than that because the fall is so severe and so sudden that your whole body flies and hits the ceiling and with such force your head breaks the ceiling, one person on board the plane dies dozens more . They're hurt and now you're wondering what just

happened

and how did I get off?

One person died and several people were injured on Singapore Airlines Flight 321. The airline says the London plane was carrying 229 passengers and crew. The plane was treated by emergency crews. They immediately began evaluating the injuries. everything I just said just

happened

. I'll show you how, through a tracking site called Flight Radar 24 we can see global air traffic in real time, isolating the flight in question and we can begin to recreate what happened. Singapore Airlines Flight 321 left London shortly after 10:30 p.m. local time, it should have arrived in Singapore about 12 or 13 hours later, but right here on its journey is where passengers feel a shaking at first and then that sudden drop and it's a catastrophic 6000 foot drop in about 3 minutes, it's say, 2000 feet per minute 33 feet. one second is very fast and then very little happens not a long way down very short the flight fell from 37,000 feet to about 31,000 according to flight tracking data and I have since heard accounts from passengers who spoke to the BBC.

Reuters that there was coffee everywhere, people were screaming, suddenly the plane started to tilt and there were shakes, so I started to prepare for what was happening and very suddenly there was a very dramatic drop, so everyone who were seated and without seat belts were immediately thrown towards the ceiling. we are divers that is the pilot's voice according to this post in Cuts to the head are apparently the most common, but someone died and had a heart attack-like problem, so maybe this may have been a V heart attack or not after the doctor had to k 4, he had 73 years old.

British man, we won't know until we see autopsy results whether it was heart failure or traumatic injury that killed him, but there's still another big question we haven't addressed, perhaps not what happened, but what caused this would happen. If deaths from

turbulence

are extreme, for example rare, the

turbulence

itself is incredibly common, we can usually detect it from quite far away as well. Pilots can see clouds moving and they can even see rain in the distance moving in these telltale ways that let them know that there is a swirling zone of disturbed air ahead and we have sophisticated weather instruments that can notice all of these things as well, but There is a type of turbulence that is invisible to the naked eye.

What Singapore Airlines EXP experienced this morning is something the industry calls clear air turbulence. Air turbulence is something you don't really notice until it's too late. What causes clear air turbulence? Well, it's thought to have a lot to do with jet streams, these narrow bands of air that whip around our planet at hundreds of kilometers per hour when they're different. Air masses collide with other masses, turbulence occurs, but without clouds you don't see any of that. It is invisible during a lighter turbulence event like this the plane will pitch it will pitch and you will bounce up and down and the plane will fall and when it falls everything that is not tied down will bounce it will move from the ground from the trays from the seats so imagine different masses of air colliding with each other some hot some cold and if a plane is enveloped in a cold air mass that suddenly sinks, the plane sinks along with it and here's the trick: there are studies that predict that climate change is causing more and more of these types of aerial incidents as the air continues to warm causing more turbulence with jet streams, one study looking at four decades of clear air turbulence saw a significant increase during that period and the projects that we will see even more of in the coming decades, in my opinion, we will have more of these, as we experience more and more climate change, keep that seat Bel in it's there for a reason, according to the National Transportation Safety Board in the In the US, when there are injuries on an airplane, turbulence is by far the most likely cause.

This incident on Singapore Air was the worst we've seen in a long time, but that may not be the case. latest