Twenty people were in intensive care at a Bangkok hospital on Wednesday after a plane crash from London killed an elderly passenger and injured more than 100 people.
Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 experienced “severe turbulence” in Myanmar on Tuesday after a 10-hour flight to Singapore, climbing and raining heavily several times. A passenger said people were thrown around the building so hard that they rattled the ceiling during the show at 11,300m, leaving many with head injuries.
Photos taken from the plane show the building in disarray, filled with food, drink bottles and bags, and oxygen tanks hanging from the ceiling. The plane, carrying 211 passengers and 18 crew, made an emergency landing at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, where medical staff used stretchers to transport the injured to vehicles waiting on the tarmac.
“I was thrown from the roof, and then as the plane fell forward, so did I,” one passenger told Australian media when they landed in Sydney on Wednesday. “I hit the ground hard and all the breakfast and glasses flew away.”
“The poor sailors were cooking breakfast for everyone, so they were the ones who got hurt the most.”
A 73-year-old British man died and 104 people were injured during the flight.
Bangkok Hospital said on Wednesday that its staff are treating or treating 85 injured people, including 20 people who are currently in the intensive care unit. The 20 people were from Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines, Samitivej Hospital said, without specifying how many were passengers or crew.
A relief flight carrying 131 passengers and 12 crew arrived at Singapore’s Changi Airport on Wednesday morning. Their relieved relatives greeted the arrivals with hugs, but were too scared to speak to reporters.
Andrew Davies, a British passenger on the Boeing 777-300ER, told BBC radio that the plane “crashed suddenly” and there was “very little warning.” “Within a few seconds of the plane landing, there was a loud scream and what sounded like a bell,” he said, adding that he helped a woman who was “screaming her head off”. .
Separately, he told a BBC podcast that he feared the plane would crash. “I remember the plane now – a big trap in the roof that people had used. There was a water bottle stuck in a hole in the ceiling,” he said. Singapore Airlines CEO Goh Choon Phong said on Wednesday that the carrier was “deeply saddened by the terrible experience” endured by those on board and expressed its condolences to the victim’s family. dead.
“flight of madness”
Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong sent his “condolences” to the family and loved ones of the deceased – identified as Geoff Kitchen, a horror film director from the Bristol area. City sends users in Bangkok to encourage the incident in Wongbook and they ‘work in Thai’.
Among the passengers, 56 were Australia and 41 Britipreans, such as the airport. Malaysia’s foreign ministry said nine of its citizens had been taken to hospital, including one in serious but stable condition.
An AFP photographer saw people wearing Singapore Airlines’ yellow shirts boarding the plane on Wednesday after it landed in Bangkok. “As for what exactly happened, it’s too early to tell. But I think passengers are too relaxed on commercial planes,” Anthony Brickhouse, an American aerospace security expert, told AFP. “The moment the captain turned off the seatbelt sign, people were freaking out.”
Davies, the passenger, said: “The plane went down suddenly” as the seat belt sign came on.
Allison Barker told the BBC that her son Josh, who was on the plane, texted her saying he was on a “crazy plane” making an emergency landing. “It was terrifying,” she said. “I didn’t know what was happening. We did not know if he had survived, it was so trying for the nerves. It was the longest two hours of my life.
Scientists have long warned that climate change is likely to increase the so-called clear air turbulence, which is invisible to the radar.
A 2023 study found that the annual duration of clear-air turbulence increased by 17% between 1979 and 2020, with the most severe cases increasing by more than 50%.
