“Deaths are rare” – Aviation lecturer at Bucks New Uni on the incident in Singapore

Lecturer for flight operations at the Buckinghamshire New University has shared its thoughts on the accident involving a British passenger on a flight with severe turbulence.

On May 21, Singapore Airlines Flight 321 carried 229 people from London Heathrow to Singapore Changi Airport before making an emergency landing in Bangkok, Thailand.

Severe turbulence over Myanmar resulted in a 73-year-old British man suffering a heart attack and subsequently dying, while 104 people were injured.

Singapore Airlines said the flight “suddenly encountered extreme turbulence” about 10 hours after takeoff at an altitude of 37,000 feet over the Irrawaddy Basin in Myanmar, prompting the pilot to declare a medical emergency and divert the plane to Bangkok.

Experts describe turbulence as “common” and assure that it “rarely” leads to deaths. But what is turbulence and how dangerous can it be?

Marco Chan, of Bucks New University, told the PA news agency that turbulence is generally divided into four types.

“Turbulence is of course dangerous and that is why we have put in place so many lines of defence to avoid it wherever possible.

“If we can’t do that, we will react to it.

“That’s why it’s so rarely in the news, and why there are so few deaths or injuries.

“It is always invisible to the pilot and even to weather radar systems. It does not detect the turbulence on any of our screens or displays. So we have to rely on our own experience.

“And of course, when we see a thunderstorm ahead or we are in clouds, we know there will be turbulence, so we try to avoid it.

“We basically don’t know we’re encountering turbulence until we encounter it.”

What is turbulence?

Turbulence is chaotic air movement that can cause an aircraft to suddenly move in flight, the Met Office explained.

Triggers can be air waves that form when they come into contact with mountains and can eventually hit an aircraft, “like ocean waves crashing onto a beach,” as well as jet streams and thunderstorms. A final type of turbulence is the so-called “turbulence wake.”

According to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), wake turbulence occurs when an aircraft generates lift.

For Singapore Airlines, the incident was the first fatal aviation accident since the crash of Flight 006 24 years ago, in which 83 people lost their lives.