Will be interesting to see what the subsequent investigation determines.
A Latam flight earlier this year suffered “severe turbulence”, as initially reported – but it turned out to be a mechanical issue where a flight steward and bumped a control the moved the First Officer’s seat forward into the control yoke.
A few years ago, a wildly reported “drone strike” involving an Aeromexico flight inbound to Tijuana was subsequently determined to be a maintenance issue that had caused the radome to have a weakness that led to its collapse.
It is common for the speculation to be wrong or incomplete.
There has been commentary/speculation by airline pilots that the Singapore airline incident might not be a turbulence event. But we will not know until an investigation is completed.
UPDATE: Transport Safety Investigation Bureau Preliminary Investigation Findings of Incident Involving SQ321 (mot.gov.sg). Concludes they encountered “convective air turbulence” (not “clear air turbulence”). Convective turbulence is, for example, associated with flying through a thunderstorm with strong up and down drafts, which the aircraft was apparently doing.
Daily Sceptic (activist web site): No Increase in Air Turbulence Accidents for 30 Years as Climate Zealots Shamelessly Exploit Singapore Airlines Incident
UPDATE: Stop Making Plane Turbulence About Climate Change | The Free Press (thefp.com) (This article has since been corrected – it originally and incorrectly said the paper on future turbulence had been retracted, and that was a false statement. A subsequent paper provided a re-analysis finding no statistical significance – the paper was not retracted as originally posted by the FP. The author of this article has an MA in economics and an MA in international affairs.)
Most of the media ran with a nonsense story headline about a “change in gravitational forces” – oh my, this is what happens when English Lit majors report on STEM subjects:
For the next 1-2 weeks, the media will report on every incidence of turbulence – claiming each one is due to climate change, which is bad reporting: Twelve injured after Qatar Airways flight hits turbulence
