Tiffany Reyes had just returned to her seat from the bathroom and was about to put on her seat belt when Hawaiian Airlines Flight 35 sank. In an instant, Reyes found herself on the floor of the corridor, staring at cave-in ceiling panels and a broken bathroom sign that was hanging. “I asked everyone around me, ‘Was that me?’ Reyes said in an interview on Monday. “He said that I had apparently been blown into the ceiling and slammed to the ground.” Reyes, 40, was one of 20 people on the flight – passengers and crew – taken to hospitals after turbulence struck his plane that flew from Phoenix to Honolulu without warning on Sunday.
The condition of 11 people was critical. Overall, 36 people received medical treatment for bumps, bruises, cuts and nausea, said Jim Ireland, director of Honolulu Emergency Medical Services.
Reyes was on his way home after picking up his daughter, Kaylee, from college. He initially thought that something had hit the plane and it was about to crash. He briefly thought they were going to die because he had never encountered anything so violent in a flight before. “It’s the most terrifying experience I’ve had in my entire 40 years of life,” Reyes said.
Reyes was not bleeding. And the adrenaline surging through him eventually dulled the pain to come. She crawled back to her seat. and her daughter, who was bound and gagged and escaped injury, “kept holding me the whole time.”
Others have had it much worse, Reyes said. He saw a woman getting off the plane with a wound on her head and blood on her face and clothes. An ambulance took Reyes to an emergency room where she was x-rayed, her blood was taken, and several other tests were performed. After five hours there, she and her family — her daughter, son and husband — went home to decompress.
He had a headache which started subsiding from Sunday night. But he started having pain in the left side of his body. “I can’t even walk in bed,” Reyes said. “So I have to sleep on my back without moving.”
The National Transportation Safety Board said Monday that it is investigating the incident. The entire flight carried about 300 people and carried many vacationers by air, such as Jackie Hayata Aino, who was on his way home. “It was just rocky,” she told KHON-TV. “And then, it quickly escalated to the point where we were shaking so much that we were pretty much like floating out of our chairs.”
John Snook, chief operating officer of Hawaiian Airlines, said such turbulence was isolated and unusual, noting that the airline had not experienced anything like it in recent history. He said three flight attendants were also among the injured. Jazmin Bitanga, who was also flying home for the holidays, said there were two drops in altitude, one of which was so strong it sent her boyfriend’s water bottle into the ceiling of the plane.
“Just all around me, people were crying,” she told Hawaii News Now. Snook said there was some internal damage to the plane during the turbulence. He said there were signs for wearing seat belts at the time, although some of the injured were not wearing them. Snook said the airline was aware of the forecast for thunderstorms and unstable wind and weather conditions, but there was no warning that the particular patch of air where the turbulence occurred was “in any way dangerous”.
He did not know how much altitude the plane lost during the disturbance, saying it would be part of an investigation involving the National Transportation Safety Board. The plane’s flight data recorder would provide those details, he said. He said the probe would also ascertain what the passengers and crew were doing at that time.
Snook said the Airbus A330-200 began descending shortly after the disturbance. Due to the number of injuries on board, the crew declared a state of emergency and air traffic controllers gave priority to the flight to land. Snook said the plane will undergo a thorough inspection and maintenance, mostly to fix components in the cabin.
Snook said he could only speculate whether some passengers suffered head injuries, but this was likely based on injuries and damage to cabin paneling. Snook said, “If you’re not wearing your seatbelt, you stay where you are, and that’s how those injuries happen.”
He said the inquiry would examine whether other measures, apart from turning on the seat belt sign, were taken to ensure that the passengers were buckled in. A high wind warning and flood watch were in effect Monday for Hawaii as a strong front moved across the islands, according to the National Weather Service.
On Monday, a United Airlines plane traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Houston went seriously wrong. The airline said two passengers and three crew members suffered “minor injuries” shortly after takeoff at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston and were taken to a hospital. The airline did not describe the nature of the injuries.
The 2021 NTSB report on preventing turbulence-related injuries on scheduled passenger flights states that wearing a seat belt reduces the risk of serious injury. It also found that air traffic control procedures for processing pilot weather reports were “time-consuming and non-standardised”. The report noted that air carriers often share observations about turbulence with their own personnel, but not across the entire national airspace system.
In 2019, 37 passengers and flight crew members were injured when an Air Canada flight from Vancouver to Sydney was hit by intense turbulence about two hours before takeoff from Hawaii. A Boeing 777-200 was flown to Honolulu, where the injured were treated. Thirty people were taken to hospitals and nine had serious injuries.
Most people associate turbulence with heavy storms. But the most dangerous type is the so-called clear air turbulence. Wind-shear phenomena can also occur in clear air with wispy cirrus clouds or thunderstorms, as differences in temperature and pressure create powerful currents of fast-moving air. Aircraft can go into turbulence without warning in clear air.