An ex-pilot has claimed that the deadly turbulence on a Singapore Airlines flight in May was caused by “human error” that led the aircraft to encounter a thunderstorm.
Flight SQ321, with 211 passengers and 18 crew on board, departed London Heathrow on 20 May and diverted to Bangkok after it hit severe turbulence 10 hours into the journey to Singapore.
A 73-year-old British man, Geoffrey Kitchen, died as a result of a suspected heart attack, while seven other people were left in critical condition and dozens more were taken to hospital.
Former Australian Air Force and Qantas pilot Richard Woodward has theorised that the crew made a “terrible miscalculation” based on satellite images of the area over Myanmar.
With 33 years of flying experience, Mr Woodward told 60 Minutes Australia: “With my background, I’m fairly certain that they had an encounter with or were very close to a thunderstorm.”
The aviation expert said that the airspace above Myanmar is an area “notorious for its thunderstorms” and flight SQ321 flew in a straight line directly for a building storm and lightning strikes “without a single deviation from the source”.
Initial findings by Singapore’s Transport Safety Investigation Bureau (TSIB) of “likely flying over an area of developing convective activity” led to reports that the Boeing 777-300ER encountered atmospheric phenomena Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) – a claim that Mr Woodward disputes.
“It’s very rare to have a clear air turbulence encounter in the tropics,” he told 60 Minutes Australia, adding that there is “compelling evidence” that what flight encountered was not CAT but a thunderstorm.
Mr Woodward said the multiple other aircraft seen on flight radars that took other routes in the minutes before the plunge show that the crew could have “seen the storms on their radar” and taken “evasive action”.
Simon Calder, travel correspondent of The Independent, said: “In the initial report into this awful event, there was one line that caught my eye – a reference to the plane ‘likely flying over an area of developing convective activity’.
“The investigators from the Transport Safety Investigation Bureau in Singapore will be pursuing this aspect – and whether an airline based in the tropics, with all the extreme weather that entails, should…
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