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Seven injured as Qantas Airbus slams passengers into the ceiling
A Qantas Airbus A330-300 flew through what airline staff referred to as a "severe meteorological incident". The "incident" was actually bad turbulence, and it was so severe that the plane plummeted, sending passengers into the ceiling.
The flight was en route from Hong Kong to Perth when it hit the turbulence. Because the drop was so sudden, the flight crew did not have the time to warn passengers to be strapped in, though it does underline how important it is to have your seat belt buckled at all times.
It isn't hard to see some similarities between this flight and the recent crash of Air France flight 447 - especially since both were on the exact same type of plane.
Planes often rely on information from other aircraft on the same route to report on turbulence, but if the route is not very busy, it may be hours between reports.
Bad turbulence can cause severe injuries, a collection of some of the most recent incidents involving bad turbulence can be found in the gallery posted below:
Gallery: Bad turbulence
More crazy stories from the skies
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mikael Jun 22nd 2009 5:57PM
Wow, Qantas is having a really rough time right now. How many incidents have they had in the past 12 months? 9-10? And Airbus isn't doing much better with two, potentially three, A330s diving after hitting turbulence in just three months time.
Joe Jun 23rd 2009 1:43AM
Airbus has problems, but I believe Air France Flight 447's Airbus 330 fell out of the sky due to it's tail fin (vertical stabilizer) snapping off in true Airbus fashion. Almost all, if not all of their models still in the air have the same type of tail fin. It's unnatural the way they always seem to be found intact, somewhere far away from the eventual crash site. It would be a huge expense to re-design and retro-fit the whole Airbus fleet w/ new tail fins, so Airbus wants to blame the pitot tubes, because they're cheap to replace. Before, Airbus would simply blame the pilots, but pilots are tired of that. Airbus markets their planes as not needing a pilot, but when something goes wrong, that's who they'd blame. Anyway, when Flight 447's tail fin snapped off, the plane went into a flat spin or Dutch roll, which would cause the disparity in speed readings among the pitot tubes. Other manufacturers use a composite tail, but not attached in the same manner as Airbus. I hope they find the black box, but doubt France is trying very hard to find it. Airbus brings in tons of money to France and the rest of the EU. Hate to think the people running Airbus are sociopaths, but in light of how many of the people running things have been exposed as much by the economic downturn, think it's a strong possibility.
Paul Murray Jun 23rd 2009 11:11AM
There was also in May 2009 an Air Canada flight (AC34) from Sydney to Vancouver that had to be diverted to Honolulu for an emergency landing. Four people were taken off to hospital in Honolulu. My mother-in-law who continued to Vancouver came off the plane in a wheel chair and eventually found out she had two cracked vertebrae from the incident.