Dr. Cecilia Laguzzi was sleeping while on an overnight flight home to Uruguay when the mother of two said she was woken up by severe turbulence and found her 2-year-old son stuck in the ceiling above the overhead compartment. "It was an image I will never forget," Laguzzi told "Good Morning America" following the incident on the Air Europa flight , which the airline said resulted in several passengers being hurtled toward the ceiling of the cabin.
The flight from Madrid to Montevideo, Uruguay, experienced "heavy" turbulence early Monday morning and was diverted to Brazil "due to the nature of the turbulence and for safety reasons," the airline said. The plane landed safely at Natal International Airport in São Gonalo do Amarante and several passengers were treated for serious injuries, it said. Laguzzi, a surgeon, said she was returning home from a three-month internship in Barcelona and was traveling with her husband and their two young children when she was woken up by unknown objects hitting her, she said.
"I felt something very hard hitting my head and then my back, and I fell on my head, and I couldn't get up at first," she said. "I remember I was in the plane, and I could feel it like falling, like free falling, for what felt like an eternity." Laguzzi estimates that after six or seven seconds, the plane resumed normal operations, at which point she started looking for her children, who had been sleeping several seats away near her husband.
She found her four-year-old.
