In December of 2022, Flight UA1722 from Maui to San Francisco was reported by media to have plunged half of its altitude in a matter of seconds due to severe turbulence. Just last week, a Lufthansa flight from Austin, TX to Germany reportedly fell thousands of feet, sending seven people to the hospital for injuries after an emergency landing.
Is this just sensationalized reporting by the media, or do commercial jets actually plummet from the sky and recover just before crashing? Why and how does this happen?
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It depends on the phenomenon but turbulence can cause a significant loss of altitude. If you are humming along in consistent air pressure and hit a huge pocket of turbulence, which means the air is going up or down along a gradient (basically the air is a different temperature) the plane can and does drop. Usually this is measured in a hundred feet or so, it can be so bad as to be a thousand feet.
The other phenomenon that happens is a micro burst, which could account for UA1722 but they are approaching that as pilot error.
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