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Andrew Davies was on his way to New Zealand to work on a Doctor Who exhibition, for which he was project manager. The first leg of his flight from London to Singapore was fairly smooth. Then suddenly the plane hit severe turbulence.
“Being on a rollercoaster is the only way I can describe it,” he recalls. “After being pushed into my seat really hard, we suddenly dropped. My iPad hit me in the head, coffee went all over me. There was devastation in the cabin with people and debris everywhere.
“People were crying and [there was] just disbelief about what had happened.”
Mr Davies was, he says, “one of the lucky ones”.
Other passengers were left with gashes and broken bones. Geoff Kitchen, who was 73, died of a heart attack.
Death as a consequence of turbulence is extremely rare. There are no official figures but there are estimated to have been roughly four deaths since 1981. Injuries, however, tell a different story.
In the US alone, there have been 207 severe injuries – where an individual has been admitted to hospital for more than 48 hours – since 2009, official figures from the National Transportation Safety Board show. (Of these, 166 were crew and may not have been seated.)
But as climate change shifts atmospheric conditions, experts warn that air travel could become bumpier: temperature changes and shifting wind patterns in the upper atmosphere are expected to increase the frequency and intensity of severe turbulence.
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