“The plane just fell.” Seven injured on a turbulent flight to Australia

Seven people were injured during a flight from Hawaii to Australia. The Hawaiian Airlines flight, with 163 passengers and 12 crew on board, was en route from Honolulu to Sydney on Thursday.

On Monday (local time), about five hours into the flight, the airline said it was “in unexpected high turbulence.”

“The plane just went down,” passenger Sultan Pasconiali told ABC News. “We were not prepared for that.”

She described how a man flew and hit his head on the ceiling and fell again. Another passenger, Tara Goodall, told the Associated Press how her two sons were “thrown into the cabin of the plane.”

After landing in Sydney, the airline said, three injured passengers were checked by airport medics and discharged from hospital. A passenger and three flight attendants were taken to hospitals for evaluation. The flight attendants have since been fired.

Severe disturbance in early December

Last December, severe turbulence injured 25 people on another Hawaiian Airlines flight, six of them seriously.

The captain of the flight from Phoenix to Honolulu told investigators that conditions were calm under clear skies when a cloud suddenly appeared in front of the plane. John Snook, Hawaiian Airlines’ chief operating officer, said at the time that such disruption was unusual and that the airline had not experienced anything like it in recent memory.

dpa