Five people were taken to hospital – one of them in a critical condition – after a United Airlines jet ran into severe turbulence on a flight from Denver to Billings, Montana, on Monday.
A passenger said one woman hit the cabin ceiling so hard that she cracked a panel during the incident, which happened as the Flight 1676 was making its descent for a scheduled landing at 1:23 p.m. local time (3:23 p.m. ET).
Three flight attendants and two passengers went to hospital, the airline said in a statement. All were released except for one flight attendant.
St. Vincent Healthcare in Billings said the remaining patient was in a critical condition.
Joe Frank, 20, a passenger on board on the Boeing 737-700 told The Denver Post in an e-mail that the aircraft dropped suddenly and with such force that an infant flew from a parent’s arms and landed, unharmed, in another seat nearby.
“The sudden drop pulled everyone out of their seats, and I mean hard,” Frank told the newspaper.
“There was a lot of screaming, a lot of hollering,” Dahlin told KTVQ.