The Singapore Airlines incident caused ‘life-changing’ injuries. Turbulence and in-cabin risk could change flying
By Emily Clark
Posted Sat 25 May 2024 at 4:58 am

The Incident and Injuries
Aviation experts believe this incident is a glimpse into a future where there is an increased risk of deadly turbulence, but also where the in-cabin experience will need to be vastly different. Innovation in aircraft safety is a perpetual quest, and the world does not see as many plane crashes as it once did. But the Singapore Airlines incident this week suggests the next frontier is avoiding in-cabin injuries and the unfortunate loss of life that can happen when a plane hits unexpected turbulence at 37,000 feet.

A few days ago, the director of Bangkok’s Samitivej Srinakarin Hospital read out details of the injuries among the 41 passengers and crew being treated there. Twenty-two people sustained spinal and spinal cord injuries. Six sustained skull and brain injuries. Thirteen have injuries to their bones, muscles, and other organs. The patients have been grouped according to their most severe injuries, but some do fall into multiple categories. These are injuries that have the potential to impact them for the rest of their lives.

Passenger Experiences
Australian man Keith Davis and his wife Kerry Jordan are among those injured. “Kerry is not in a great space at all. She’s had severe spinal trauma,” he told the ABC. “She had emergency surgery as soon as we were admitted and it remains that she has no sensation from the waist down. It is pretty life-changing.”

The Likelihood of In-Cabin Injuries
The Singapore Airlines incident has been described as happening in an “absolute instant” and as being extreme in nature. Whether a sudden movement in an aircraft is caused by turbulence or something else, it is the level of unpredictability combined with the severity of the injuries that is most alarming for an industry built on understanding and reducing risk.

Head of aviation at Central Queensland University and pilot of 40 years Professor Doug Drury told ABC News the future of aviation must consider the likely increase in turbulence. “The good news is we don’t have these major events that frequently that create this kind of damage and unfortunate loss of life,” he said. “But we can expect more and more events to occur in the future with our global climate change.”

The Montreal Convention
A former president of the Aviation Law Association and specialist aviation lawyer Peter Carter told the ABC “most countries are signatories” and would likely apply to flight SQ321 in some way. “It applies to all flights between countries [when] one of the countries is a signatory to the Montreal Convention, and Singapore and United Kingdom are, so there’s no difficulty about that,” he said.

The Montreal Convention has two tiers, placing a $260,000 cap on compensation for passengers where the airline is deemed not to be at fault. If an airline has a level of fault, passengers may be able to claim tier two compensation, which has no cap. Mr. Carter said, “legally there’s not a lot of difference” between injuries caused by a technical fault or by turbulence. “Passengers are still entitled to compensation for their proven injuries, subject to the $260,000 first tier cap,” he said.

Future Safety Measures
Singapore’s Transport Safety Investigative Bureau has sent its people to Bangkok to learn more about how this incident happened. The investigation may reveal what type of turbulence flight SQ321 flew into as passengers were being served breakfast and why it wasn’t detected.

Dr. Drury said the risk of in-cabin injuries from sudden drops or turbulence “is not going to go away.” “Something is going to have to change and it will have to come down from regulatory [bodies],” he said. “Can we build in padding or put flexible bottoms on the overhead bins? They were hitting the overhead bins so hard that they were opening up … and the baggage was falling out. So do we lock the bins to prevent that? There will have to be some modifications.”

But no matter the type of turbulence, or if in the case of the LATAM incident in March, a technical fault caused the aircraft to suddenly move, Dr. Drury said “there was one common denominator” when it came to the risk to passengers and crew. “They were not wearing seatbelts,” he said. “I understand how people feel about that sometimes, but it is for our own protection. I never take my seatbelt off, if I need to I’ll loosen it up a little bit, but I’ll never take it off.”

He believes this incident will likely force regulators to look at whether the seatbelt sign should be on more often or as a default setting. “Can it be something as simple as having a sensor in the buckle itself? It says, ‘seat 32B is showing red’, so then the cabin crew will have to go back there and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, you need to put your seatbelt on’,” he said. “I do think regulators … will all begin to look at events like this a little bit differently and what kind of rule making changes need to be put in place. And so if they write the rules that say that the seatbelt sign has to stay on at all times, then the airlines are going to have to adapt the way they do business. It’s going to present some really interesting challenges.”