Emergency landing of a Boeing 777 in Thailand
A Singapore Airlines flight makes an emergency landing after reported extreme turbulence and one passenger dead. (Credit: Viral Press)
The recent incident involving a Singapore Airlines flight that had to make an emergency landing in Bangkok on Tuesday following "severe turbulence" has sparked heightened awareness around the dangers of turbulence and areas where passengers are likely to experience it.
The Boeing 777-300ER jet was heading from London to Singapore with 211 passengers and 18 crew onboard when it "encountered severe turbulence en-route" over Burma. One person died and 30 were injured.
Weather.gov describes turbulence as "one of the most unpredictable of all the weather phenomena that are of significance to pilots."
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A passenger onboard the Singapore Airlines flight told Reuters that travelers were launched out of their seats when they encountered turbulence. (Reuters / Reuters Photos)
According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), turbulence is created by atmospheric pressure, jet streams, air around mountains, cold or warm weather fronts or thunderstorms.
It could be "as insignificant as a few annoying bumps" but it can also "momentarily throw an airplane out of control or to cause structural damage," according to Weather.gov.
During the Singapore Airlines incident, flight tracking data from the website FlightAware shows the aircraft quickly lost several thousand feet of altitude after traveling at 37,000 feet.
The most turbulent routes:
Turbli analyzed 150,000 routes and ranked those with active airline routes as of December 2023.
The most turbulent flight was the route from Santiago in Chile to Santa Cruz in Bolivia, according to the data. Meanwhile, the second most turbulent route was determined to be between Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, followed by Lanzhou, the capital city of northwest China's Gansu province, and Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China's Sichuan province.
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Flights leaving Tokyo and Seoul and heading to areas in Nepal, Bangladesh and India are among the top five long haul routes that experience the most turbulence, according to the Turbli database.
Airport staff prepare for the arrival of a flight Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 at at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok, on May 21, 2024. (Viral Press)
Here are the top North American routes with the most turbulence:
1. Nashville, Tennessee, to Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina
2. Charlotte, North Carolina, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
3. Denver to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
4. New York (JFK) to Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina
5. Warwick, Rhode Island, to Syracuse, New York
6. Atlanta to Northern Virginia
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7. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina
8. New York (LaGuardia) to Portland, Maine
9. Boston to Syracuse, New York
10. Boston to Philadelphia
Gxstocks' Greg Norman contributed to this report.
