“Seat belt signs are switched off. Please keep your seat belts fastened while seated” is a simple cautionary that all airlines transmit once aircraft reach their cruising height. Passengers invariably ignore the warning, which is why modern aviation, which is safer than crossing the street in Chennai or Karachi, gets a bad name as most injuries occur when aircraft hit unexpected turbulence, including clear air turbulence that is much harder to detect.
The chaotic scenes inside a London-Singapore flight of Singapore Airlines, with an impeccable safety record stretching to a quarter century as the last fatality on board occurred in the year 2000, may have been caused by an extraordinary drop of 6,000 feet in three minutes. Passengers were said to be floating vertically into the lights above as well as horizontally with the flight possibly running into the fringes of a fast-developing tropical thunderstorm while flying over the Irrawaddy River basin in Myanmar before it made an emergency landing in Bangkok. The flight was already 30 miles off its projected path to avoid thunderstorms.
Wind shear is a nightmare at cruising altitudes while developing thunderstorms come with strong updraft, as a global weather forecaster explained. While the single fatality may have been caused by a cardiac event in an elderly passenger amid the chaos of the plane dropping freely, the airline’s stoic flying staff came in for high praise in handling the emergency. The incident does not tar the.