Now a Qatar Airways flight has hit
severe turbulence over Turkey, injuring 12 people.
The Boeing 787 landed safely as scheduled in Dublin.
But last week, a Singapore Airlines flight made an emergency landing in
Bangkok after severe turbulence killed one passenger and injured dozens of
others. Bloomberg's aviation reporter Danny Bee
joins me now from Hong Kong. Danny, pretty alarming that two such
turbulence in the incidents has have happened in the course of the last
couple of weeks. What exactly has happened and what do we
know about this latest incident that occurred on the Qatar Airways flight?
Yeah, another bout of turbulence and more injuries, but this time on a Qatar
Airways flight from Doha to Dublin. Of course, this incident happened over
Turkey. The plane was okay enough to fly onwards
to its final destination. Qatar Airways say, though, that the 12
passengers and crew who were injured suffered from what they say is minor
injuries. But, you know, with these kind of
incidents frequently being highlighted taking place, it just highlights the
need for passengers ultimately to be wearing their seat belts because it's a
rule that is not mandatory when you are flying.
And of course, with what happened last week with a Singapore Airlines jet where
one person died and several dozen people were injured and people who suffered
extensive injuries from paralysis to spinal and brain injuries, which people
are still also being currently treated for in hospital in Bangkok because of
that Singapore incident. Mhm.
I mean, one of the takeaways for me after just watching these incidents the
last couple of weeks is I'm not sure why I would ever take my seatbelt off
sitting on a plane going forwards, but I'm curious to hear what some of the
passengers on board that Qatar Airways flight had to say.
Yeah, there were some very colorful accounts of what had happened, and
particularly from one of the passengers who spoke to the local broadcaster, RTS
had said was that, you know, it felt like the plane was falling for several
seconds. You know, food was flying around the
cabin. You know, some of the people who
observed having cuts, one of the crew on board was in a sling afterwards.
Now now, it is ultimately very important that people do wear the seat belts at
all times. That's what the airlines advise.
But it doesn't seem like there's an appetite for was necessarily changed to
make seatbelt wearing non-trivial and it's very difficult at a global airline
level to get any kind of aviation safety change done very quickly.
Sometimes takes years, even a decade or more, and is actually going to be one of
the topics is probably going to be talked about a little bit in Dubai
actually over the weekend when the global aviation industry actually gather
for for their annual meeting. So it's going to be very interesting to
hear what airline CEOs have to say. But for now, in this Qatar Airways
incident, the airlines say it is conducting an internal investigation.
