A Southwest Airways flight attendant suffered a significant backbone harm after a tumultuous touchdown remaining month in California.
The staff member sustained a compression fracture to her 3rd thoracic vertebra all the way through landing on the John Wayne-Orange County Airport in Santa Ana on July 1, consistent with federal protection investigators.
The have an effect on of touchdown used to be so excessive that the flight attendant idea the airplane had crashed, the Nationwide Transportation Protection Board (NTSB) record stated.
The airline employee used to be seated in a bounce seat at the Southwest Boeing 737 together with her seatbelt on and in “brace place” when the incident reportedly came about. The record said she felt such intense ache in her again and neck that she couldn’t transfer.
Not one of the different 141 other people within the cabin had been injured within the incident, however the worker used to be taken to a neighborhood medical institution the place she used to be identified with a fracture, consistent with the NTSB.
The pilots had been knowledgeable concerning the flight attendant’s harm. The 55-year-old captain and 49-year-old co-pilot instructed investigators that they had been aiming for the standard landing zone at the slightly brief runway.
The runway that the airplane landed on is 5,700 toes lengthy (1,700 meters). By way of comparability, runways on the within sight Los Angeles World Airport span between 8,900 and just about 13,000 toes (2,700 to three,900 meters), in line with flylax.com.
In a commentary to HuffPost on Tuesday, the Dallas-based airline stated: “The security of Southwest’s consumers and workers is all the time our best precedence. We’re involved when any worker is injured. We reported the subject to the NTSB according to regulatory necessities and performed an inner evaluation of the development.”
The security board finished its investigation with out disclosing what brought about the touchdown, NBC Information reported. The respectable paperwork from the coincidence have now not been made publicly to be had by means of the NTSB, which didn’t talk over with the coincidence website online.