Singapore Airlines flight hits severe turbulence, one passenger dead, seven critically injured

Bangkok (Reuters): One passenger was killed and 30 injured after a Singapore Airlines (SIAL.SI), opens new tab flight hit severe turbulence on Tuesday, flinging passengers and crew around the cabin and forcing the plane to land in Bangkok, officials and the airline said.

The flight from London and bound for Singapore fell into an air pocket while cabin crew were serving breakfast before it encountered turbulence, prompting the pilots to request an emergency landing, Bangkok Suvarnabhumi airport general manager Kittipong Kittikachorn told a press conference.

Photographs from the interior of the plane showed large gashes in the overhead cabin panels, gas masks and panels hanging from the ceiling and items of hand luggage strewn around. A passenger said some people's heads had slammed into the lights above the seats and punctured the panels.

"I saw things lying everywhere and many air crew injured" with bruising, Kittikachorn said after the most critically injured passengers and crew had been evacuated.

A 73-year-old British man died during the incident, likely due to a heart attack, Kittikachorn said. Seven people were critically injured, some with head injuries. He added people were calm as they were led from the plane.

Eighteen people have been hospitalised and 12 are being treated in hospitals, Singapore Airlines said. The carrier has sent a team of 50 people to help take care of the injured at the hospital, Kittikachorn added.

"Singapore Airlines offers its deepest condolences to the family of the deceased. We deeply apologise for the traumatic experience that our passengers and crew members suffered on this flight," the airline said.

It was not immediately possible to reconstruct the incident from publicly available tracking data, but a spokesperson for FlightRadar 24 said it was analysing data at around 07:49 GMT which shows the plane tilting upwards and return to its cruising altitude over the space of a minute.

A passenger who was on the flight told Reuters that the incident involved the sensation of rising then falling.

"Suddenly the aircraft starts tilting up and there was shaking so I started bracing for what was happening, and very suddenly there was a very dramatic drop so everyone seated and not wearing a seatbelt was launched immediately into the ceiling," Dzafran Azmir, a 28-year-old student on board the flight 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," he said.

Kittikachorn said most of the passengers he had spoken to had been wearing their seatbelts.

The spokesperson for FlightRadar 24 said with regard to data showing a drop in height, "our initial thinking is the turbulence event is prior to the standard descent from 37,000 to 31,000 feet. That appears to just be a flight level change in preparation for landing."

The Boeing 777-300ER plane had 211 passengers and 18 crew when it made the emergency landing, the airline said.

Suvarnabhumi airport said the plane requested an emergency landing at 3:35 p.m. local time (8:35 a.m. GMT) and landed at 3:51. Uninjured passengers disembarked and an another aircraft will fly them onwards. The airline said it landed at 3:45 pm.