Passengers on board a Singapore Airlines flight that hit “severe turbulence” have described their terror as the plane dropped thousands of feet before it leveled off and made an emergency landing in Bangkok.
“I saw people from across the aisle just going completely horizontal, hitting the ceiling and landing back down in really awkward positions,” Dzafran Azmir, 28, told Reuters Wednesday.
Azmir, a student, added that people were “getting massive gashes in the head,” as the Boeing 777-300ER making its way from London to Singapore dropped in the sky.
One passenger, widely identified in the British press as Geoff Kitchen, 73, died during the incident.
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Without naming the passenger Kittipong Kittikachorn, general manager of Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport said Tuesday the person had some medical problems that could have led to a fatal cardiac arrest.
“It was obvious the gentleman needed some help,” passenger Andrew Davies, 54, told Reuters, adding that medics conducted CPR for about 20 minutes.
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Bangkok’s Samitivej Srinakarin Hospital said in a statement Wednesday that it was still treating 58 people and 20 patients remained in the ICU. In total, it said 104 people were treated. Singapore Airlines said the flight was carrying 211 passengers and 18 crew.
Among those treated was British passenger Josh Silverstone, 24, who told the Associated Press that he chipped a tooth and suffered cuts to his eye and his neck. “There were lots of people in worse positions than me, people were laying out on the floor and they couldn’t move, they were completely paralyzed,” he said.
Praising the cabin crew, Davies said he saw many of them had been injured in the incident. One, he said “was in an awful lot of pain with his back. But he continued serving people and helping people and getting medical help as much as he was able to.”
After setting off at 10:38 p.m. London time (5:38 p.m. ET) Monday, the plane’s journey appeared to be uneventful, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware.
But about 10 hours in, the plane experienced a sharp drop from a cruising altitude of 37,000 feet to 31,000 feet in just five minutes, the FlightAware data said. In one sudden lurch, it dropped almost 700 feet.
Less than 10 minutes later, the plane began its descent into Bangkok.
Rapidly developing, explosive thunderstorms were recorded near the flight path by weather forecasting service AccuWeather.
Photos and videos posted by passengers from inside the plane shortly after the incident showed overhead panels ripped off and food, bottles and personal possessions strewn around the cabin. One video showed a blood stain smeared on the ceiling plastic.
“Heads had literally pushed through and broken plastic panels and, like, there was just, there’s blood and there’s bits and pieces just broken everywhere,” Azmir, the student, said.
Singapore Airlines’ CEO Goh Choon Phong apologized “for the trauma experienced by all passengers and crew members on this flight,” in a video posted to Facebook. He added that he wanted to express his “deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of the deceased passenger.”
Officers from Singapore’s Transport Safety Investigation Bureau were investigating the incident, the country’s Transport Minister Chee Hong Tat said in a Facebook post Wednesday.
As the plane was manufactured by U.S. company Boeing, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was sending an accredited representative and four technical advisers to support the investigation, he added.
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