A passenger died, victim of a “severe turbulence”, during a Singapore Airlines flight, Tuesday May 21, between London and Singapore. It was during the flight over Asia that the Singaporean company’s Boeing 777, which was carrying 211 passengers and 18 crew members, was caught in an air gap.
The aircraft had to divert to Bangkok (Thailand) to help the thirty injured people. A dozen passengers were hospitalized. “What we call air gaps are ascending or descending wind currents that suddenly change direction”, explains Philippe Evain, Air France captain and former president of the National Union of Airline Pilots. These feared phenomena occur in particular “when a plane passes the point of friction between a mass of warm air and another of cold air”describes another Air France pilot. “At that moment, the device rises suddenly then descends just as violently, or vice versa”continues Mr. Evain.
Sometimes, says another pilot, “during very violent turbulence the plane can suddenly gain or lose 4,000 to 5,000 feet”, that is to say going up or down from 1,300 to 1,500 meters. As during this “flight of an Air France A330, seven or eight years ago over the Pyrenees”he recalls.
“Avoid stormy areas more widely”
Thanks to the Flightradar application, which collects real-time flight data from commercial aircraft around the world, “we can see that the Boeing 777 suddenly loses altitude at a given moment”reports Franklin Auber, French communications manager for Singapore Airlines.
Deaths after such an accident would be very rare. At Air France, the last death of a passenger following turbulence occurred on September 4, 1996. “More than twenty-five years ago, during a flight between Johannesburg (South Africa) and Paris, the passenger took a television screen in the face”, remembers the pilot. It was precisely after this accident, comments Véronique Damon, captain of the Air France A220, that “the company changed flight procedures and required pilots to circumvent stormy areas more widely and to have working radar”.
According to a seasoned Air France pilot, “there is no more turbulence” due to global warming than before. Indeed, he says, “high altitude turbulence is little influenced by the weather”. On the other hand, as air traffic increases, the number of planes suffering from such turbulence increases hand in hand.
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