Passengers on a Delta Air Lines flight from Salt Lake City to Amsterdam found themselves unexpectedly landing in Minneapolis on Wednesday night after severe turbulence forced the pilot to divert the flight and make an emergency landing. And the turbulence was so severe that 25 of those passengers were taken to the hospital to be treated for their injuries, the Associated Press reports. Once again, those who weren’t wearing their seatbelts reportedly took the brunt of it, including the cabin crew.
According to Fox 13 Utah, the plane had been in the air for about 90 minutes when it encountered the turbulence, with one unnamed passenger telling the news channel the Airbus A330-900 dropped suddenly while the flight crew was in the middle of drink service. “Every one of them flew and hit the ceiling, the beverage carts also flew into the air,” the passenger told Fox 13. “Any items that were loose in the cabin got thrown everywhere. [The] plane is a mess, covered in liquids and service items.”
Joseph Carbone, another passenger on the flight, told Fox 13 that the turbulence came in a series of three waves, with each one worse than the last. According to Carbone, the pilot later told him the plane dropped at least 1,000 feet, although Delta has yet to officially confirm that claim. The Independent reports that data from Flightradar24, a flight-tracking website, shows the flight dropped from 38,000 feet to 35,775 feet over the course of about 90 seconds.
“I just saw everything fly through the air,” Carbone told the news channel. “…I’ve never experienced anything like that, but from now on, when I’m not up, going to the bathroom or doing something, I’ll be in my seat with my seatbelt on. You learn that lesson real fast.”
Turbulence is getting worse
Currently, there isn’t much information on the extent of the injuries suffered by those on the flight, which took off carrying 275 passengers and 13 crew members. Hopefully, no one is too banged up, and everyone recovers quickly.
If it feels like turbulence has been getting a lot worse lately, that’s because it is. And it’s not just that flights are encountering turbulence more frequently, either. The turbulence itself is getting worse. As we reported last year:
For example, there’s a 2023 paper by University of Reading researcher Mark C. Prosser studied trends in clear-air turbulence, a type of turbulence that occurs without clouds or thunderstorms present, and the results don’t paint a pretty picture. While light-or-greater CAT only increased 17 percent over the North Atlantic between 1979 and 2020, moderate-or-greater CAT increased by 37 percent, and severe-or-greater CAT jumped a whopping 55 percent. So it’s not just that turbulence is happening more frequently. We’re also seeing more severe turbulence.
Unfortunately for those who prefer to bury their heads in the sand and pretend this isn’t the result of human-caused climate change, the available evidence says that it is. As Dr. John A. Knox, an aviation turbulence researcher at the University of Georgia, put it at the time:
Warmer ocean water and warmer surface temperatures lead to warmer air with more water vapor in it, and that’s the fuel for thunderstorms. So it is entirely plausible that in the future the thunderstorms that we have will be more vigorous than they are now, and it’s already been demonstrated that we’re getting shorter, heavier bursts of rain than we used to in parts of the United States. So if that’s already happening, it seems like a slam dunk for the future. And so if you’re flying around more vigorous thunderstorms or trying to fly above them, it is very plausible that you would have more turbulence related to convection.
