THREE flight attendants have been hospitalised and others injured after severe turbulence throws them in the air on board a packed flight.
Paramedics rushed onto the tarmac at Sydney Airport when the Delta Airlines flight DL 41 landed at 6.45am on Friday.
Three cabin crew were taken to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital for further treatment.
Five others were treated at the scene for back pain, headaches and knee pain.
It’s understood an elderly passenger was among the injured.
A spokesperson for Delta told 7News the flight, from Los Angeles to Sydney, encountered “brief turbulence”.
“Nothing is more important than the safety of our people and our customers, and our priority is taking care of the impacted crew members,” they said.
There were 245 passengers and 15 crew members on board the Airbus A350.
It comes after a British Airways stewardess who was flung in the air during turbulence is suing for £72,000 after claiming the pilot flew into a “danger zone”.
Laura Lanigan, 56, was left in agony after the BA Boeing 777 suffered a “violent drop” above Mumbai, India, in June 2019.
The veteran stewardess claimed she was hurled into the air and crashed back to the floor – fracturing her knee and dislocating her shoulder – with an unsecured drinks canister also falling on top of her.
Lanigan is now suing the airline for £72,500, claiming her accident was caused by the pilot flying too close to a storm cloud.
She said the pilot should have spotted signs of a nearby cumulonimbus cloud – a “large, dark storm cloud” – and taken steps to stay more than 20 miles away from it.
But BA claim there was no visual evidence of a storm cloud and nothing on the pilots’ weather radar to suggest one.
Instead, an operating officer on the flight deck had reported only “fluffy white clouds” in the sky, the company’s barrister Peter Savory said.
Central London County Court heard the plane was coming to the end of a nine-hour journey from London Heathrow to Mumbai when Lanigan suffered her injury.
Her lawyers said there had been “mild to moderate” turbulence towards the end of the flight and the passenger seat belt warning signs were turned on.
But shortly before the plane was due to land, it suffered a more extreme jolt – sending Lanigan flying into the air before crashing back down.
