Passengers on a Singapore Airlines flight hit by severe turbulence on Tuesday described a sudden, dramatic drop as “all hell broke loose” on board the Boeing airliner carrying 229 passengers and crew.
At first, “the flight was perfectly normal,” said passenger Andrew Davies, who was traveling to New Zealand for business. He described the flight as “quite smooth … I don’t remember any turbulence at all.”
Flight SQ321 was cruising at 37,000 feet from London to Singapore when flight tracking data shows the plane dropped sharply before climbing several hundred feet, then repeated the dip and ascent, for about a minute.Many passengers were having breakfast at the time of the incident.
Then, about nine or 10 hours into the roughly 13-hour flight, he was watching a movie when he saw the seat belt sign light up – so he put his seat belt on. “Thank goodness I did because within moments of doing that, all hell broke loose,” he told CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.”
“The plane just felt like it dropped. It probably only lasted a few seconds, but I remember vividly seeing shoes and iPads and iPhones and cushions and blankets and cutlery and plates and cups flying through the air and crashing to the ceiling. The gentleman next to me had a cup of coffee, which went straight all over me and up to the ceiling,” Davies said.
Images from the plane afterward show the cabin in disarray, with papers, cups and water pitchers scattered on the floor, and ceiling panels and piping hanging loose.Davies was sitting toward the front of the plane and witnessed some of the injuries sustained by dozens of passengers – including Geoff Kitchen, a 73-year-old Briton who died on the flight.
“That gentleman was sitting right behind me,” he said. “Lots of people needed some help but we tended to this gentleman, and I helped carry him, get him out of the seat, and we laid him on the floor so that some medical professions could administer CPR.”
Kitchen was given CPR for about 20 minutes, said Davies. Meanwhile, he said, “there was so much screaming,” and people’s injuries were evident; when he turned around, he saw one passenger with “a big gash in her head and blood pouring down her face,” and another elderly passenger in “severe shock.”
Another passenger, 28-year-old student Dzafran Azmir, told Reuters that the aircraft had begun “tilting up” and shaking.
“Very suddenly there was a very dramatic drop so everyone seated and not wearing a seatbelt was launched immediately into the ceiling,” he told Reuters. “Some people hit their heads on the baggage cabins overhead and dented it, they hit the places where lights and masks are and broke straight through it.”
Azmir added that the whole thing was “really, really quick – which is why I think nobody could really respond to it.” People didn’t have time to react, he said – there were passengers in the plane bathrooms and air crew still standing when the turbulence hit.
