Passengers screamed in horror, held onto strangers’ hands and prayed out loud after an Air France flight was rocked by severe turbulence in the skies over England.
Four cabin crew members were injured when the New York-bound plane suddenly lost altitude less than an hour into its flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Aarti Virani, one of 484 passengers on board, said the turbulence struck without warning as flight attendants were serving beverages and it lasted about a minute.
Even though she said it was brief, she described it as a terrifying ordeal that drove some fearful passengers to pray for their safety before the pilot announced that the Airbus A380 superjumbo jet was returning to Paris.
Mrs Virani, from Jersey City, New Jersey, said: ‘I’ve been flying my whole life so I’m used to turbulence here and there but it was unlike anything I have experienced.
‘We felt weightless for a second and then it felt very long and it felt like we were being tossed.’
The 30-year-old added: ‘People were praying loudly. There was a gentleman next to me who was reciting Muslim prayers loudly, there was screaming – it was pretty rough.
‘There was one baby that was crying really loudly, which added to the sense of panic.’
When flight AF006 suddenly dropped in altitude Mrs Virani and a young woman seated next to her grabbed each other’s hands and held on until the turbulence ended.
‘We just kind of instinctively reached for each other’s hands. It just seemed like the thing to do.’
Her 37-year-old husband, Raj, who was seated ten rows behind her due to a booking glitch, saw pillows and other objects go flying.
She said: ‘I imagine food would have been all over the place had we had trays of food on our tables. The drop felt pretty significant.’
Mrs Virani, who survived a 7.3-magnitude earthquake that killed thousands of people in Japan in 1995, said she had a flashback to that experience because she was so petrified and her adrenaline kicked in.
She said there was no indication that passengers and crew were in for a bumpy ride.
She said: ‘When the strongest gusts hit us they came without warning because when we were ascending the pilot made a short announcement saying it was going to be a smooth ride and there were a few clouds, but when we get above them that it should be a smooth ride to New York.
After the turbulence everybody calmed down a little bit and maybe 10 to 15 minutes later the captain made an announcement saying there were flight attendants who had been injured and we had to turn around so they could receive medical attention,’
She said there was a suggestion that the turbulence was caused by the ‘leftovers’ of a jet stream from a flight ahead of them.
‘That made us think, “How close are we to another flight?”’
But Air France spokeswoman Ulli Gendrot described it as ‘clear skies turbulence’.
After the incident the captain chose to abort the eight-hour transatlantic journey and turn back to Paris so the injured workers could be assessed by paramedics.