Severe turbulence forces Delta A330 to make emergency landing, 25 injured

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/31/severe-turbulence-delta-25-passengers-injured

30•voxadam•21h ago

Comments

cjrp•21h ago

Always wear your seatbelt, even in the cruise.

Aloha•21h ago

This is so important I put mine on, and avoid taking it off until I'm on the ground again.

nielsbot•21h ago

My mom worked on airplanes for 35 years—-She always told us this.

She was once flung to the ceiling (and then back to the floor) while trying to get back to her seat.

noir_lord•20h ago

I do, I tighten it for take off/landing and loosen it a little once we are at cruise - it's not even noticeable but it's better than impacting the ceiling.

cjrp•16h ago

> Passengers reported they were told one of the flight attendants had suffered a broken rib, another person a fractured leg. The trolleys had been lifted and impacted the cabin ceiling and fell to the floor several times, passengers not wearing their seat belts also hit the cabin ceiling. The crew announced they had lost more than 1000 feet of altitude, they hadn't seen such severe turbulence ever before.

https://avherald.com/h?article=52b0a50c&opt=0

amatecha•4h ago

Yeah, I've heard enough stories of people getting hurt on passenger planes from unexpected turbulence that I always have the seatbelt on during the entirety of any flight. Could make the difference between getting a severe injury or not!

appreciatorBus•21h ago

Flightpath

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL56/history/202507...

Track log https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL56/history/202507...

Looks like something happened around 19:20

thomascountz•18h ago

Lowered and raised 1000+ ft in about 1-2 minutes!

the_third_wave•20h ago

...and as if on queue the narrative around climate "crisis" is woven into an article about a plane experiencing turbulence: experts say the issue is getting worse in an era of climate crisis. Do publications like the Guardian have narrative quotas they need to achieve?

graemep•20h ago

The Guardian is highly6 ideological.

I would have thought the main reason the issue is more common is simply there are far more flights.

plucas•20h ago

This study from the University of Reading found that severe turbulence has indeed increased significantly and measurably over the last 40 years: https://research.reading.ac.uk/research-blog/2023/06/28/avia...

macintux•20h ago

More energy = more turbulence? Amazing that it's a point of contention.

gosub100•20h ago

And if you found research contradicting that narrative, it would risk your career and/or would not be published. There is only one way to think, not open discourse.

For instance, wildfires. It's definitely climate change because something bad happened. Not classical phenomena about wind currents drying out vegetation. Or increased human development into wild areas, or a century of PUTTING OUT smaller fires, or environmental regulations against harvesting lumber. No, the only way to think is the way that leads to more regulations, taxes and grants and government waste, criminal charges for the unlucky SOB who starts the fire, higher prices (in energy, cars, buildings, and insurance), and more human suffering that they can sell you their next solution for. For this reason, I don't believe a single thing they say anymore.

dagmx•20h ago

The irony that you are claiming everybody else will not listen to conflicting evidence while not providing any of your own and saying that you won’t believe anything unless it passes your own world view.

gosub100•17h ago

The irony is that if the CA forest were logged and the timber used to build homes, the price of housing would be lower, there would be fewer homeless people, more people with jobs, and few or no devastating fires (less CO2, you know, the big bad "greenhouse gas") . But admitting that would be heretical to the pseudo-religion that is leftism. The party profits when suffering increases.

dagmx•17h ago

I legitimately cannot tell if this is a parody comment or not.

It shows a shocking lack of familiarity with the effects of deforestation, carbon capture, logging rules for sustainability, land ownership for building the houses or even what the bottlenecks for housing currently are.

All to blame the intellectually bereft bogeyman of “leftism” when forests exist in many right wing states, and the right wing currently runs the government and yet even they don’t do what you’re suggesting…

gosub100•14h ago

You didn't address a single thing I said.

hydrogen7800•20h ago

>It's definitely climate change because something bad happened. Not classical phenomena about wind currents drying out vegetation.

>[T]he extent to which this trend is due to weather pattern changes dominated by natural variability versus anthropogenic warming has been unclear... Our results show that for the period 1979 to 2020, variation in the atmospheric circulation explains, on average, only 32% of the observed VPD [vapor pressure deficit] trend of 0.48 ± 0.25 hPa/decade (95% CI) over the WUS during the warm season (May to September). The remaining 68% of the upward VPD trend is likely due to anthropogenic warming.[0]

[0]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111875118#executive-s...

alexk307•17h ago

But that's not what the paper says. It says Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) has gotten worse, not all types of turbulence. In this case, the flight flew through a convective storm.

Even so, the paper says there's been a 0.2-0.3% change in CAT:

> The largest increases in both absolute and relative MOG CAT were found over the North Atlantic and continental United States, with statistically significant absolute increases of 0.3% (26 hr) and 0.22% (19 hr), respectively, over the total reanalysis period.

gosub100•20h ago

Further, if you say the same thing every time, it's not "news". "$semi-intersting-story...and oh, the climates changing". It's a non-sequitur

mhb•20h ago

Could be many things. Did they consider whether the incidence of seat belt wearing has decreased? It doesn't seem that far-fetched that compliance with the directive to fasten seat belts has decreased along with respect for authority.

interestica•18h ago

Interesting! As a continued hypothetical, it's interesting that the "No Smoking" permanently-lit sign is next to the seatbelt one. It's a weird contradiction: by being an electronic illuminated sign in the most prominent area (like a passenger HUD - reserved for critical info) it is given an elevated importance that doesn't really align with user expectation (is it really on the same level as the 'alert' implementation of the seatbelt sign?). So, there may be some kind of "cries wolf" subtle psychological effect in play: the cigarette signage is so obviously unnecessary in place and prominence that maybe the seatbelt signage takes on some of that cognitive placement (and implied importance) in mind. I think it kind of plays into that "respect for authority" you noted -- not unlike the possibility that programs like DARE that tried to group drugs like marijuana with heroin may have caused an increase in harder drug use when people realized that they were misled by that initial 'noble lie'. (See also mask use during the pandemic)

graemep•18h ago

I wonder why they have it at all. Every flight I have been on for a very long time is completely no smoking.

I think it may have that effect on the seatbelt sign, but is it greater or less than when the no smoking sign was actually worth checking?

curt15•16h ago

Respect for authority has decreased?

mhb•16h ago

yes

dagmx•20h ago

Would you like to refute their claim?

Climate change causing turbulence increase is well acknowledged https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-turbulenc...

alexk307•18h ago

That paper has nothing to do with the incident in question. You're referencing a BBC article that references a paper stating that Clear Air Turbulence is getting worse [1]

> Turbulence is unpleasant to fly through in an aircraft. Strong turbulence can even injure air passengers and flight attendants. An invisible form called clear-air turbulence

But in the incident in question, the plane flew directly through a convective storm.

[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL10...

dagmx•12h ago

Ah fair call out about it being a convective storm, but those have even more evidence of worsening relative to climate change.

qcnguy•13h ago

Yeah he's right, Guardian and BBC are garbage. Check the actual data from the people who would know.

https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS2101....

Page 34. They have a graph. "After normalizing the data by annual flight hours, there was no obvious trend over time for turbulence-related Part 121 accidents during this [30 year] period."

BBC article is citing some academics doing a modeling exercise. They never learn. Academics can prove the sky is green if they're allowed to play with R for long enough. That paper isn't measuring actual turbulence, they try to derive it from physical models, but their models must suck because they draw a totally different conclusion to the real world experience of accident investigators. Evidence > academic theories.

dagmx•12h ago

That report refers to accidents caused by turbulence not incidents of turbulence though.

genewitch•12h ago

the "accident" refers to title 14 part 121 of the CFR, where an accident is after disembark with the intent to fly and before landing where a person is "seriously injured or killed" per 49 CFR section 830.2 (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-VII...); and it's any injury where hospitalization is required for more than 48 hours, or a fracture of any bone except simple fractures of fingers, toes, nose.

it does not mean "crash", although a crash would be included. Specifically, bouncing off the ceiling and fracturing your arm or whatever would count as an accident per the definition.

it's completely valid as a refutation of the bbc article.

genewitch•12h ago

if you actually read the cited study it boils down to "we plugged in numbers and these neat heatmaps came out" and if you look at the dates it's 1979 and 2020 (in the heatmaps) and i wonder how much of that is actual location accuracy. i notice the word "accuracy" isn't in the study. that is, there were both less flights and less accuracy of actual location in 1979 (no GPS, etc); and more flights and actually accurate location information "today". It explains the heatmap differences without having to model climate at all. It would be more interesting if there was a similar, zoomed map over some coastal route during daytime for the two years where the pilots knew exactly where they were at nearly all times.

it's a fresh "model" and if you've used an LLM you know how useful models are; and the sorts of models used in these studies are about 1 billionth the size.

Further, their own dataset shows massive areas with decreased turbulence. I guess the sun and CO2 don't work there?

ya, HN, i know.

dagmx•9h ago

Are you seriously comparing a simulation model to an LLM model?

maybelsyrup•20h ago

Looks like they flew right over convective while everyone else flew around it. Attempt to save fuel? Gotta justify Delta tickets being double everyone else’s.

EverydayBalloon•20h ago

"Turbulence has long been a problem for air travelers, but experts say the issue is getting worse in an era of climate crisis which produces more extreme atmospheric conditions."

lol

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