Australian Husband Describes Singapore Airlines Turbulence Trauma [Video]
Last week, a Singapore Airlines flight from London to Singapore rerouted to Bangkok. Over Myanmar, the airplane suffered gravitational changes and a 178-foot altitude drop, which sent passengers and crew members to the hospital.
Many have spine and neck injuries that are keeping them under ICU-level care. One person died of a suspected heart attack. Now, the husband of a severely injured passenger is recounting the May 21st events. The video is embedded below.
“We just fell into a huge hole, and we’re free-falling.”
59-year-old Australian Keith Davis was flying with his 52-year-old wife, Kerry Jordan. They were unbelted. Suddenly, they experienced what Davis describes as a “zero-gravity situation.”
“It was an absolute instant; we were on the ceiling,” Davis says in a video released by ABC News. “There’s no announcement; we did not see any indication at all.”
Davis says he and Jordan went to the ceiling. Davis pushed into the face mask compartment. Jordan hit the luggage doors.
“Instead of landing back into the seat area, she fell flat, straight into the aisle,” Davis explained. “From that moment, she didn’t move.”
Jordan suffered severe spinal trauma that required emergency surgery. According to Davis, she has no sensation from her waist down.
NBC shared that David hopes to return to Adelaide with Jordan, but it could be weeks.
‘Convective activity’ likely caused the turbulence
The report released by the Transport Safety Investigation Bureau of Singapore suspects that convective activity in the skies above Myanmar caused the gravitational changes. Temperature shifts resulted in 4.6 seconds of extreme turbulence on the Singapore Airlines flight.
According to flight records and black box data, the crew showed immediate signs of attempting to address the turbulence. They manually controlled the plane for 21 seconds after the incident began.
Since the incident, other crews have been avoiding the convective zone, fearing that it could repeat the traumatic events suffered by flight SQ321.
