Multiple passengers and crew sustained injuries after a Delta flight traveling from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia was hit by significant turbulence on Friday morning.
Delta Flight 41 "encountered brief turbulence" as it landed at the Sydney airport, a representative for the carrier informed. Several cabin crew members required medical attention.
Local paramedics reported they treated five individuals, and took three of them to a medical facility with non-life-threatening injuries that comprised spinal discomfort and headaches. The patients' ages ranged from their 30s up to the 70s.
This marks the newest example of commercial jets experiencing turbulence, with aviation specialists pointing out that shifting climate patterns is a significant contributor.
There were nearly 250 travelers and fifteen staff members on the wide-body jet, the representative added, stating that the plane landed "without further incident" at the airport at shortly before 7 a.m. on Friday morning.
Paramedics reported they were alerted just a mere three minutes prior to the plane landed, and ambulances were waiting on the tarmac.
Why in-flight bumpiness is growing increasingly prevalent - and potentially more dangerous.
In the previous year, 25 people sustained injuries when a separate Delta aircraft, travelling from Salt Lake City, Utah to Amsterdam, Netherlands, hit "significant" rough air just a couple of hours into the lengthy trip, and had to make an unscheduled landing.
Recently, passengers and crew on a Singapore Airlines flight went through a harrowing brief five-second of severe turbulence. One passenger passed away and numerous people sustained injuries, as those without seatbelts lifted out of their seats and fell back down.
Bumpy air is fairly routine on aircraft journeys, and while occurrences of strong or severe turbulence appear to be increasing, they are statistically infrequent.
Estimates show that there are around five thousand cases of significant in-flight disturbance every year, out of a sum of more than 35 million journeys that now take off around the world.
Severe turbulence is defined as when the sudden jolts of a jet experiencing disturbed air generate greater than 1.5g-force on your body - sufficient force to throw you from your seat if you were not fastened by a seatbelt.
As global warming modifies the conditions in the sky, researchers alert that flying could become more turbulent: shifts in temperature and shifting wind patterns in the upper atmosphere are expected to boost the frequency and intensity of dangerous in-flight bumps.
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