[dporter]

> How common is it for a plane to fall 4,000 feet in seconds?

It wasn't 4,000 feet, but last month a United Airlines flight leaving Hawaii dropped 1,425 feet shortly after takeoff: https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/airlines/a42887614/u...

[elygre]

That event got world wide news coverage, indicating that is was highly unusual.

[Zanni]

Not that unusual. Just a month earlier, 25 passengers were injured on a flight coming into Hawaii from Phoenix, 6 of them severely enough to require hospitalization. [0]

"Between 2009 and 2021, at least 146 people, including passengers and crew members, were seriously injured by turbulence ..."

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/business/hawaii-airlines-...

[throwawayacc5]

Considering the billion people flying in that time frame, 146 serious injuries is less than a rounding error.

[User23]

It’s precisely because we’ve treated these “rounding errors” seriously that aviation is so incredibly safe. It didn’t used to be, it got that way because the engineers treated even a single injury as an unacceptable failure.

[throwawayacc5]

Except this isn't even a rounding error, it's less than that. You can't engineer out the basic physics of turbulence for winged propelled aircraft.

[Zanni]

Agree that turbulence is inescapable, but that's exactly why every passenger should have a seat belt.