Several Affected as Turbulence Impacts A Delta Airlines Plane Landing at Sydney, Australia
A number of individuals have been injured when a Delta Airlines jet from LA to Sydney, Australia experienced significant turbulence Friday morning.
Delta Flight 41 "experienced a brief period of turbulence" as it touched down at Sydney Airport, an airline spokesperson told. A number of the onboard staff sustained injuries.
Local paramedics reported they treated five individuals, and took three of them to hospital with relatively minor issues that included back pain and headaches. The patients' ages ranged from their 30s up to the 70s.
It is the latest incident of aircraft experiencing severe turbulence, with aviation specialists pointing out that global warming is a significant contributor.
On board were 245 people and 15 crew members on the aircraft, the Delta spokesperson said, adding that the plane touched down "without further incident" at Sydney Airport at shortly before 7 a.m. on Friday morning.
The NSW Ambulance Service indicated they got a call just only 180 seconds prior to the plane arrived, and emergency vehicles were ready and waiting at the airport.
Why plane turbulence is becoming more frequent - and more severe.
In the previous year, 25 people were hurt when a Delta Airlines flight, flying from Salt Lake City to Amsterdam, Netherlands, encountered "considerable" turbulence just 120 minutes into the transoceanic journey, and was forced to make an precautionary landing.
Earlier this year, passengers and crew on a Singapore Airlines jet experienced a harrowing five seconds bout of severe turbulence. A traveler passed away and numerous people sustained injuries, as unbelted passengers lifted out of their seats and fell back down.
Bumpy air is fairly routine on aircraft journeys, and while occurrences of significant turbulence are reportedly becoming more frequent, they are statistically infrequent.
Data suggests that there are approximately thousands of instances of severe-or-greater turbulence annually, out of a total of over 35 million journeys that currently occur around the world.
Intense turbulence is described as when the sudden jolts of a jet experiencing disturbed air generate more than 1.5 times the force of gravity on your body - sufficient force to throw you from your seat if you were not fastened by a seatbelt.
As a changing climate shifts atmospheric conditions, specialists caution that air travel could become less smooth: warming trends and altered air currents in the upper atmosphere are projected to increase the frequency and intensity of dangerous in-flight bumps.
