In total, about fifty passengers on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner of the Chile-based LATAM company were treated by emergency services and twelve of them had to be taken to hospital. One person is in critical condition.
Emergency services announced on Monday 11 March that twelve passengers on a flight from Sydney to Chile via Auckland, New Zealand had been hospitalized after a technical incident caused an “air hole”.
According to the New Zealand Herald, the accident happened in a plane belonging to the Chilean company LATAM. Flight LA800 “experienced a technical incident during the journey that caused heavy movement. According to the Chile-based LATAM company, the plane landed as planned at Auckland Airport.”
Passengers reported to local media that the Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane rapidly lost altitude over the Tasman Sea, according to the company, ejecting everyone who was not wearing a seat belt on the roof.
“People were flying through the air because they didn’t have seat belts,” one passenger told RNZ radio.
“Some people were really injured. People were really scared,” the man said, his voice shaking.
The plane, which was then bound for Santiago, “landed at Auckland Airport as planned”, he told AFP, “expressing his deep regret for the inconvenience and embarrassment caused by this situation”.
Emergency services are understood to have been alerted at around 4pm local time (4pm French time) before leaving for the airport with five ambulances. As many as ten ambulances and other medical vehicles reached the airport to treat the injured.
“Our ambulance teams assessed and treated about 50 patients, one of whom was in a critical condition,” St John Ambulance New Zealand’s Gerard Campbell told AFP. The incident comes nearly two months after problems involving another model of American aircraft manufacturer Boeing.
In early January, the door of a Boeing 737 MAX 9 operated by Alaska Airlines came loose minutes after takeoff, causing several minor injuries. The 737 MAX was previously grounded for nearly two years after the crashes of two aircraft, the first, of Indonesian company Lion Air in late 2018, and the second, of Ethiopian company Ethiopian Airlines, in early 2019, which killed more than 350 people. In both cases, a problem with new software was the cause of the crash.
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