A video is going viral on social media of a flight from Phoenix to Hawaii that was rocked by severe turbulence Sunday morning about 30 minutes from Honolulu over the Pacific Ocean.
Thirty-six people on a flight to Honolulu were injured when the plane experienced “severe turbulence” on Sunday, December 18, with 11 passengers sustaining serious injuries.
Honolulu Emergency Medical Services confirmed that paramedics took 20 passengers aboard a Hawaiian Airlines Flight to two local hospitals. Nine of the 20 passengers had minor injuries, while 11 sustained serious injuries, including a baby.
Jim Ireland, the Director of the Honolulu Emergency Services Department, said at a press conference that one person was knocked unconscious, adding that about ten passengers experienced vomiting and nausea.
The 20 hospitalized passengers included 17 passengers and three crew members. According to the airline, the flight was carrying 288 people – 278 were passengers, while 10 were members of the flight crew, including two pilots and eight flight attendants.
“Do we have any trained medical personnel?” A Hawaiian Airlines flight attendant asked over the intercom.
One passenger shared her terrifying experience with the Associated Press. Tiffany Reyes told the news outlet that she had used the bathroom briefly, and when she got back to her seat, all hell broke loose. She was just about to buckle her safety belt when the airplane suddenly dipped, and she found herself on the floor in the aisle.
When she got up after briefly blacking out, she asked people around her what had happened, and they told her that she had flown into the ceiling and then thumped onto the floor. Reyes crawled back to her seat and reunited with her daughter, who was still buckled up and had escaped injuries.
She said it was the most horrifying experience that she had ever lived through in all of her 40 years.
“It was just rocky. And then, it quickly just escalated to, like, the point where we’re shaking so much that we were, like, pretty much like floating off of our chairs,” passenger Jacie Hayata Ano told a media source.
After landing, paramedics took Reyes to the hospital, where she underwent various tests, including X-rays and a blood test. She was in the emergency room for five hours before they released her.
Hawaiian Airlines Chief Operating Officer, Jon Snook, said the airline had not experienced such an incident in recent history. At a press conference on Sunday afternoon, Snook said that the aircraft had sustained some internal damage during the turbulence. He said the seatbelt sign was on at the time of the incident, but some passengers were not buckled up.
The National Transportation Safety Board announced that they would be investigating the incident.
Hawaiian Airlines said the flight landed safely at 10:50 am at the Daniel K. Inouye Airport. Medics provided medical attention to all passengers and crew members with minor injuries at the scene.
A meteorologist who works with the National Weather Service in Honolulu said the agency had issued a weather advisory for thunderstorms in Oahu and various areas that could have been in the flight path.
Snook said that the airline was aware of the advisory and the unstable weather conditions. But, they received no warning that the particular area where the turbulence happened was dangerous.
According to Snook, the NTSB would investigate how much altitude the plane lost during the turbulence, as the flight recorder would provide the board with the details. The aircraft will undergo serious maintenance and inspections to fix damaged components in the cabin.
This year has seen several instances of turbulence causing injuries. Eight people were hospitalized in July after a flight from Tampa to Nashville experienced severe turbulence. That was just a few weeks after another flight experienced turbulence and four people had to be treated for minor injuries.
