Passengers Thought Problem With The Plane

Some passengers were telling CNN that the turbulence was so severe that it threw some passengers up and and they hit the upper compartments, breaking them. Several of them were seriously injured. These were passengers who did not have their seat belts fastened.

Others are saying that that the turbulence happened immediately and the plance started to drop. So may be this is why people did not have time to fasten their seat belts. Also it happened in the middle of the night. Probably some passengers were sleeping.

A U.S. lawyer of Brazilian origin said that, he thought they would not make it. Being a frequently traveler he said he had never experienced a turbulence like this. "People (were) screaming, then there was a huge silence for like 30 minutes," Loss said."

The Continental flight 128 was on a night flight from Rio de Janeiro to Houston. FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said the turbulence struck about halfway between Puerto Rico and Grand Turk island, north of the Dominican Republic.

Turbulence Explained in Wikipedia

Clear-air turbulence is impossible to detect either with the naked eye or with conventional radar, meaning that it is difficult to avoid. However, it can be remotely detected with instruments that can measure turbulence with optical techniques, such as scintillometers or Doppler LIDARs.

This kind of turbulence creates a hazard for air navigation. Because aircraft move so quickly, they experience sudden unexpected accelerations or 'bumps' as they rapidly cross invisible bodies of air which are moving vertically at many different speeds. Cabin crew and passengers on airliners have been injured (and in a small number of cases, killed, as in the case of a United Airlines Flight 826 on December 28, 1997) when tossed around inside an aircraft cabin during extreme turbulence. BOAC Flight 911 broke-up in flight in 1966 after experiencing severe lee wave turbulence just downwind of Mount Fuji, Japan.

Wake turbulence is another dangerous type of clear-air turbulence. The rotating vortex-pair created by the wings of a large aircraft can deflect or even flip a smaller aircraft on the ground. It can also lead to accidents in large aircraft as well. Delta Air Lines Flight 9570 crashed at the Greater Southwest International Airport in 1972 while landing behind a DC-10, leading to new rules for minimum following separation from "heavy" aircraft. American Airlines Flight 587 crashed shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2001 due to pilot overreaction to wake turbulence from a Boeing 747 that caused separation of the vertical stabilizer.

Written by Armen Hareyan
Materials from CNN and AP are used int his story.