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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This is fairly rare but does happen from time to time. Especially with tens of thousands of flights each day these things does happen once or twice a year. The airplanes of course have to be constructed to handle this and even more. So it is just a danger of people falling over and getting hurt by lose items.
This happens because airplanes fly in the air and will therefore follow the winds. And there are some atmospheric conditions that can create huge vertical winds up and down. At the altitudes the airplanes fly, up in the jet stream, these can be quite big and powerful. And of course since it is just the wind they are invisible. That means that there is a chance that an airplane will basically fly into this invisible vertical jet stream and fall down with it. It is not exactly a fall, but it would feel more like an extreme elevator ride. Fortunately these vertical winds do not go all the way down to the ground, because the ground is in the way. So at some point the vertical winds turn into horizontal winds and the airplane is able to maintain its altitude. Since airplanes are designed to handle these forces there is little chance of crashing from these events, but injuries in the cabin can be expected. This is why you are told to keep the seatbelt on in flight, even if the fasten seatbelt light is off, and to always keep your luggage safely stowed.
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