Most frequent fliers know to keep their seatbelts on whenever they’re seated, just as the pilots say they do themselves. It’s even more imperative to wear a seatbelt when the seatbelt sign is on and there’s turbulence or it’s about to get turbulent. And when the flight attendants are told to return to their seats, you better make sure you’re seated and your seatbelt is on nice and tight.
This week, a Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) flight was rerouted back to Europe after severe turbulence forced its return. According to Fox Business, “flight SK957 with service to Miami traveled back to Copenhagen when rough air over Greenland sent its 254 passengers and their baggage flying, as seen in a video taken by passenger Sammy Solstad (embedded below). Solstad’s video of the flight’s severe turbulence has since gone viral online. In the chaotic video, people are heard screaming as he shouts, “Help her up!”
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Solstad, who was born in Sweden but now lives in Florida told Fox, “we come in over Greenland and we see turbulence and nothing crazy. Everything is not like usual, you know, it’s always a little bit [turbulent], but my wife woke me up and she was concerned and said, ‘it shakes a lot.’ And I said, ‘it’s going to be okay.’”
Since he and his wife run a YouTube channel, he pulled out his camera. “So, okay, I’ll take a little video because people start screaming, and they start to be pretty rough. But I thought everything was okay and right when I took that video – that is the video you see when the people fly up [to] the roof or on the ceiling – and when that happened I realized, OK, this is maybe actually pretty bad,” Solstad said.
He filmed a lady from Belgium flying up to the ceiling and back on the floor. She was just lying there and the staff didn’t do anything because everyone was falling down at the time. Solstad he “couldn’t let her lie there. So in the video, you hear me screaming that they need to pick her up and nobody did anything.”
What’s even crazier and infuriating to me is that SAS chose to save money instead of choosing passenger safety and comfort by turning the plane around and flying five hours back over the Atlantic.
“According to Solstad, instead of landing in nearby Canada, the plane was rerouted for five hours over the open ocean before finally touching down in Copenhagen for inspection. “We only had about, I don’t know, 30 minutes to the Canadian airport where we could emergency land, but the pilots said they were not allowed to because SAS wanted them to fly back to Scandinavia, so they can’t repair an airplane there,” Solstad said. “And we had, like I said, about 30 minutes to Canada for emergency landing. We had five hours back over an open ocean to Copenhagen. And that’s when the panic started in the cabin and everybody freaked out because we were going to sleep on a compromised airplane for five hours over the Atlantic Ocean instead of 20, 30 minutes and emergency land somewhere.”
As a passenger this would be infuriating and terrifying so beware when flying SAS as it seems their executives would rather save money than take care of their customers.
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