The crew of a Germany-bound Lufthansa flight, that suffered “severe turbulence” on March 1 asked the passengers on board to delete all images and videos they recorded of the incident, Insider reported.
After the turbulence over Tennessee, US the flight had to make an emergency landing at Washington, DC's Dulles Airport.
The Airbus A330 reported severe turbulence at an altitude of 37,000 feet (about 11,300 meters) while flying over Tennessee, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.
"It was shocking," passenger Susan Zimmerman told ABC News. "It was kind of like you're in slow motion, that you just see everything, like in a movie, where you just see everything lift and all of a sudden it just comes right back down." Turbulence continues to be a major cause of accidents and injuries during flight, according to a 2021 NTSB report. Turbulence accounted for 37.6 per cent of all accidents on larger commercial airlines between 2009 and 2018.
Turbulence is essentially unstable air that moves in an unpredictable fashion. Most people associate it with heavy storms. But the most dangerous type is clear-air turbulence, which can be hard to predict and often with no visible warning in the sky ahead.
Storms moved across areas of Tennessee on Wednesday night, creating strong winds in the upper atmosphere, said Scott Unger, a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in Nashville.
"It was very windy aloft, which could lead easily lead to the possibility of turbulence with any flight," he said.
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