The hospital said a total of 58 people were still under treatment at multiple medical facilities, and 27 had been discharged.
One passenger was killed and dozens were injured after a Singapore Airlines flight hit severe turbulence yesterday, flinging passengers and crew around the cabin and forcing the plane to land in Bangkok, officials and the airline said.
The scheduled London-Singapore flight was diverted to Bangkok after the plane was buffeted by turbulence that flung passengers and crew around the cabin, slamming some into the ceiling. One passenger died of a suspected heart attack.
The flight from London and bound for Singapore fell into an air pocket while cabin crew were serving breakfast before it encountered turbulence, prompting the pilots to request an emergency landing, Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport general manager Kittipong Kittikachorn told a press conference.
Photographs from the interior of the plane showed large gashes in the overhead cabin panels, gas masks and panels hanging from the ceiling and items of hand luggage strewn around.
A passenger said some people’s heads had slammed into the lights above the seats and punctured the panels.
“I saw things lying everywhere and many air crew injured,” Mr Kittikachorn said after the most critically injured passengers and crew had been evacuated.
A 73-year-old British man died during the incident, likely due to a heart attack, Mr Kittikachorn said. Seven people were critically injured, some with head injuries. He added people were calm as they were led from the plane.
There were four Irish passengers on board the flight, as well as 47 from the UK, 56 from Australia, 41 from Singapore, 23 from New Zealand, 16 from Malaysia and five from the Philippines.
There were also four passengers from the US, three from India, two each from Spain, Canada, Indonesia and Myanmar, and one from each of Germany, Iceland, Israel and South Korea.
Eighteen people have been hospitalised and 12 are being treated in hospitals, Singapore Airlines said.
The carrier has sent a team of 50 people to help take care of the injured at the hospital, Mr Kittikachorn added.
“Singapore Airlines offers its deepest condolences to the family of the deceased. We deeply apologise for the traumatic experience that our passengers and crew members suffered on this flight,” the airline said.
It was not immediately possible to reconstruct the incident from publicly available tracking data, but a spokesperson for FlightRadar 24 said it was analysing data at around 7.49am Irish time which shows the plane tilting upwards and return to its cruising altitude over the space of a minute.
A passenger who was on the flight said the incident involved the sensation of rising then falling.
“Suddenly the aircraft starts tilting up and there was shaking so I started bracing for what was happening, and very suddenly there was a very dramatic drop so everyone seated and not wearing a seatbelt was launched immediately into the ceiling,” Dzafran Azmir, a 28-year-old student on board the flight, said.
“Some people hit their heads on the baggage cabins overhead and dented it, they hit the places where lights and masks are and broke straight through it.”
Passenger Andrew Davies, from Lewisham, south London, has described passengers performing CPR on a “poor gentleman” and calling for a defibrillator.
He told Sky News that the seatbelt sign came on moments before the fall, adding: “The plane just dropped. It was an extremely surreal experience.
“Suddenly people’s belongings, cushions, teacups, plates you name it, were hurtling through the cabin. I can’t answer how long it happened for people, say three minutes.”
In a post on X, he wrote: “Passengers with medical training helping as much as they could…
People’s belongings scattered, coffee and water splattered the ceiling. Surreal. So many injured people – head lacerations, bleeding ears. A lady was screaming in pain with a bad back. I couldn’t help her – just got her water.”
He said that when the plane landed “Bangkok emergency services [were] quick to respond. Very little warning.”
Today’s News in 90 Seconds – May 22nd
Mr Kittikachorn said most of the passengers he had spoken to had been wearing their seatbelts.
The spokesperson for FlightRadar 24 said with regard to data showing a drop in height, “our initial thinking is the turbulence event is prior to the standard descent from 37,000 to 31,000ft. That appears to just be a flight-level change in preparation for landing.”
The Boeing 777-300ER plane had 211 passengers and 18 crew when it made the emergency landing, the airline said.
Suvarnabhumi Airport said the plane requested an emergency landing at 3.35pm local time (8.35am Irish time) and landed at 3.51pm. Uninjured passengers disembarked and an another aircraft will fly them onwards.
Singapore Airlines, which is widely recognised as one of the world’s leading airlines, has not had any major incidents in recent years.
Its last accident resulting in casualties was a flight from Singapore to Los Angeles via Taipei, where it crashed on October 31, 2000, after attempting to take off from the wrong runway. The crash killed 83 of the 179 people on board.