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21 Injured Aboard Turbulent Air Canada Flight

An Air Canada flight from Shanghai to Toronto was forced to make an emergency landing after severe turbulence caused the injuries of 21 passengers.

Eight passengers sustained neck and back injuries and 13 more were brought to a hospital for observation after the Boeing 777 violently pitched passengers out of their seats.

“To start with it was just OK, normal just up and down, and all of a sudden it was really violent and just shaking everybody,” passenger Yi Lee said. “Suddenly the flight is just going down and everything is really scary. The girl sitting next to me, she was sleeping and she just fly up [to the ceiling].”

The flight landed safely in Calgary without further incident, an airline spokesperson said in a statement.

To read more about this story, go to BBC.com.

[Photo: Getty]

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4 Comments
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Pdg January 4, 2016

What Euphonix8 said. Anyone who has sat for 60 minutes watching that sign with a full bladder while flight attendants go about their business like nothing is out of the norm has wised up to the "lock them in their seats to keep them out of our way" mentality in the air. I also imagine a pilot playing solitaire on his/her iPad and forgetting the light is still on. LOL

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Euphonix8 January 3, 2016

Part of it might be that people become complacent when on many flights the seatbelt sign is left on the entire flight for no reason other than they don't want to deal with people being up and about. If people grow used to the seatbelt sign being on all the time when there is no turbulence, of course they will start to ignore it, especially on a long flight when you absolutely have to use the lavatory.

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drvannostren January 1, 2016

Yea, I dunno why but it seems like now more than I've ever seen before people are ignoring the seatbelt sign. They think "well, I gotta piss, so that's that". Even the FAs sometimes have given me kind of a weird look when I purposely wait until seconds after the seatbelt sign turns off. I've never experienced turbulence that would throw me anywhere, but I obey the sign regardless. Anyone who's flown IN to Calgary knows it's a rock tumbler quite frequently, but I can't say I've ever experienced anything unusual flying over.

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sdsearch December 31, 2015

And I wonder what percentage (100%?) of the injured were people who ignored instruction to leave their seat belts on ALL THE TIME except when getting up? I presume this little girl who flew to the ceiling was not strapped in, for example. I see this unsafe behavior on lots of flights myself. People think they don't need to be strapped in when sleeping, not realizing severe turbulence can hit while they're sleeping.