Tuesday, May 21, 2024, 17:22
Pilots say that there are more and more episodes of turbulence, which is an unstable movement of air caused by changes in the direction and speed of the wind. They can occur during storms and also when the sky is apparently calm. Incidents caused by this phenomenon are increasing, as happened this Tuesday with a Singapore Airlines flight between London and Singapore, which caused one death and thirty injuries.
In July 2023, two passengers and two flight attendants were injured when a plane plummeted more than 1,500 meters during severe turbulence while flying from North Carolina to Florida. The Allegiant flight was carrying 179 passengers and six crew members.
Elizabeth Spriggs, a traveler who was sitting nearby in the back with her son, told The New York Times that the first impact of the turbulence caused a flight attendant to fall to the ground. Then came the second blow, a sharp descent that threw bags, computers and also the flight attendant into the air. “It was like watching the movie ‘The Matrix’. “We saw it rise into the air and float for a second.” During 2023, the United States Federal Aviation Administration is aware of more people injured by turbulence than in the previous ten years combined.
In March 2003, several passengers on a United airline flight ended up in the hospital to be treated for their injuries. The pilot had to make an emergency landing in New York due to strong turbulence. The aircraft had taken off in Tel Aviv with 300 people, including passengers and crew. The intensity of the air currents generated panic inside the plane. There were no serious injuries.
A few days before, the same reason forced the diversion of a Lufthansa flight that was going from Austin (Texas) to Frankfurt, Germany. The turbulence caused seven injuries. Also during that spring, twenty people were injured by shaking on an aircraft heading to the Mauritius Islands in Africa.
During long-distance air routes, pilots take advantage of the jet streams in the atmosphere to travel at higher speeds and with less fuel consumption. But, according to experts, it is near these flows where sudden changes in wind direction and, therefore, turbulence are generated. If this phenomenon continues to increase as experts predict, flights will have to opt for safer and longer routes. And expensive, therefore.
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