As the details of the devastating injuries sustained onboard flight SQ321 emerge, attention is turning to what happens to these passengers and crew now and what can be done to make all the hours spent in an aircraft cabin safer.
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.
The patients have been grouped according to their most severe injuries, but some do fall into multiple categories.Keith Davis and his wife Kerry Jordan are among them."She had emergency surgery as soon as we were admitted and it remains that she has no sensation from the waist down.The Singapore Airlines incident has been described as happening in an "absolute instant" and as being of extreme in nature.
A 2017 study predicted that severe turbulence will become two to three times more common over the north Atlantic by 2050-2080 because of climate change.As the world continues to burn fossil fuels, global temperatures are rising, and turbulence is just another natural phenomenon that's affected by that warming.Pre-COVID levels saw airlines carry 4 billion people across the world every year and the industry predicts that number to double by 2036.
Because there is also a history of equipment errors and technical faults that have led to unrestrained passengers and crew being hospitalised.Some of the injured passengers have now engaged legal representation to start compensation claims against LATAM.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.
Mr Carter said, "legally there's not a lot of difference" between injuries caused by a technical fault or by turbulence. Passengers reported several people had cuts to their heads after hitting the roof of the LATAM plane in the March incident."Lufthansa, Air Canada and Hawaiian Airlines have all had planes that encountered unexpected turbulence over the past few years with a combined injury count well above 100 passengers and crew," Mr Carter said.
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