At least 50 people were hurt when a Boeing 787 operated by LATAM Airlines dropped abruptly mid-flight from Sydney to Auckland on Monday, according to the airline and a New Zealand health service organisation that treated the injured.
The aircraft landed at Auckland airport as scheduled on Monday afternoon, according to FlightAware.
“LATAM Airlines Group reports that flight LA800, operating the Sydney-Auckland route today, had a technical event during the flight which caused a strong movement,” the carrier said.
One person is in a serious condition while the rest suffered mild-to-moderate injuries, a spokesperson for Hato Hone St John, which treated roughly 50 people at the airport, said.
“The plane, unannounced, just dropped. I mean it dropped unlike anything I’ve ever experienced on any kind of minor turbulence, and people were thrown out of their seats, hit the top of the roof of the plane, throwing down the aisles,” passenger Brian Jokat told the BBC.
Yep, it happens. Not often, but when it does you usually get a ton of injuries, because people don’t listen when the crew tell you to stay buckled in unless you need to move around.
Think of it like a car. You ALWAYS wear that seatbelt. Because you won’t have time to buckle it when an accident happens. Even on a clear sunny day, empty road: buckle up. Same thing applies to an aircraft. If you’re in a seat, buckle up.
Downvote this clickbait.
Title is definitely designed to give an impression that it’s the aircrafts fault, and to imply that the craft fell out of the sky, obviously to capitalize on the anti Beoing trend.
As others here have correctly pointed out, this is an ever present risk for all aircraft. Air is invisible, and you can’t see pockets of turbulence before you hit them. It’s a risk you should be aware of on all flights, and the reason you’re asked to keep your belt on while seated even if the light is off.
Er well in this article where they spoke with the pilot, he had this to say, "Jokat said the pilot came to the back of the plane once the plane landed.
“I asked him ‘what happened?’ and he said to me ‘I lost my instrumentation briefly and then it just came back all of a sudden’.”
So yeah, it is in fact looking like it may be something with the plane.
The Dreamliner has been plagued with issues. This would just get added to the list. :/
Yeah I’ve been through something like this. Felt like 2-3 seconds of full weightlessness, people were floating out of their seats. The scary part was we were on approach for landing so we didn’t have that much altitude to lose! Everything turned out fine, though. No injuries that i know of. Just a brief moment of terror as the magic making the plane stay in the air took a brief nap.
This happened to a flight here in the US about 10 years ago with some commentators from ESPN on it. I think one person died from their injuries, but I could be wrong on that. I know at least one person was seriously injured from hitting their head on the ceiling.
This is why they say keep your seatbelts buckled, even when cruising. Pockets of turbulence are unpredictable and can cause rapid loss of lift on the wings.
This is not good news for Boeing.
They better do a stock buyback just in case.
Don’t get me wrong, fuck Boeing, but this one might not be on them.
The endless stock buybacks are on them.
I don’t think this is Boeing’s fault. You can hit pockets of turbulence like this any time. No matter which airplane you have.
Boeing is a world leader in stock buybacks. Between 1998 and 2018, the plane manufacturer also manufactured a whopping $61.0 billion in stock buybacks, amounting to 81.8 percent of its profits. Add in dividends and Boeing’s shareholders received 121 percent of its profits.
They’re definitely not in the airplane business anymore.
Even if this has nothing to do with Boeing, it’s starting to feel like Boeing should be seized by the government and all Boeing aircraft with any known defects should be grounded until they can be thoroughly inspected and repaired if needed.
These motherfuckers are making the safest way to travel actually scary. Wtf.
Not to defend Boeing in anything at all, but it’s news stories like these that are making it seem worse than it is. They use Boeing’s name because they’ve already been in the news a bunch and it drives clicks.
When something happens unrelated to Boeing, news stories need to stop including them in headlines as clickbait
Conversely, there’s piles of evidence that Boeing has been reckless and hundreds of people are dead because of it. I don’t care about driving clicks in this context
Cold Fusion did great video about Boeing downfall since they switched from engineering focused to profit maximizing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqgTcb8DqfY
Yeah imagine if the news started reporting every traffic accident that occurs daily. People would start to be afraid to drive even though it’s already dangerous but normalized and not focused on.
It needs to be noted that airplanes generally do not drop more than five feet in turbulence- but passengers, with no real point of reference in the cabin, or experience, will vastly exaggerate how bad the drop was.
Five feet is enough to cause these injuries if people were out of their seats,
If people hit the ceiling, then the plane has to have moved down faster than the he people. Doesn’t that imply the plane moved downwards faster than gravity?
Yes, it’s the plane being accelerated in a downward direction by something. Most of the time that’s turbulence, but it appears there is more investigation ongoing here as the dip was much more severe than usual.
Yes
Turbulence can do funny shit with aerodynamic lift. However, I think most of the injuries are from people lightly hitting the ceiling from slight upward momentum (kind of like when your car goes over a big bump and you float up out of your seat) and then getting slammed to their seat when lift is very suddenly restored.
Yes it does. The fact that it moved faster than gravity is not special in and of itself - many things do that when acted upon by other forces (e.g. if you thrown a ball towards the ground, and in a similar case mentioned by another commenter). In the case of the plane though, the question is why? Was it a failure of the avionics package, erroneous input by the pilot, etc. Knowing the cause will help understand and mitigate the risks moving forward.
Sometimes, you see this phenomenon when throwing a frisbee. It can rapidly move up and down when it’s travelling a long distance due to physics and shit, probably something to do with hitting pockets of warmer and cooler air on the field. Planes can do that on a massive scale, and you better be buckled when it happens.
How can Boeing be having problems after decades of prioritizing shareholder value? I don’t get it!
“The plane, unannounced, just dropped. I mean it dropped unlike anything I’ve ever experienced on any kind of minor turbulence”
Quite the qualifier there.
To add to what others have said about buckling up. It’s not just yourself you’re putting at risk when you fail to buckle up, it’s others as well. If you get thrown from your seat you risk landing on someone on the way down.
Unless you are getting up to use the restroom, you should be buckled. Though if you are in the restroom and get bad turbulence…ugh. Potentially bad in multiple ways.
