Seven passengers on a Lufthansa flight were sent to nearby hospitals for experiencing “significant turbulence” after the airplane was diverted to Washington Dulles International Airport, according to officials. Flight 469 from Austin, Texas, was intended to land in Frankfurt, Germany, but instead made a safe landing in Virginia on Wednesday night, according to Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority spokesman Michael Cabbage.
According to reports, seven people were sent to hospitals with injuries, which were deemed minor, when the crew responded on the flight. The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the Airbus A330 reported severe turbulence at an altitude of 37,000 feet (about 11,300 meters) while flying over Tennessee. The agency is investigating.
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“It was shocking,” passenger Susan Zimmerman told ABC News. “It was kind of like you’re in slow motion, that you just see everything, like in a movie, where you see everything lifting up, and all of a sudden, it’s right back down.”
Remains a leading cause of turbulence and injuries during flight according to 2021 NTSB report. Turbulence accounted for 37.6 percent of all accidents on large commercial airlines between 2009 and 2018.
Turbulence is essentially unsteady air that moves unpredictably. Most people associate it with heavy storms. But the most dangerous type is clear-air turbulence, which can be hard to predict, often with no visual warning in the sky ahead.
Scott Unger, a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in Nashville, said the storms moved into areas of Tennessee Wednesday night, bringing strong winds in the upper atmosphere. “It was a very strong wind, which could easily have given rise to the potential for turbulence with any flight,” he said.
with PTI inputs