A Scandinavian Airlines flight was rerouted back to Europe after severe turbulence forced its return, according to a statement.
Flight SK957 with service to Miami traveled back to Copenhagen when rough air over Greenland sent its 254 passengers and their baggage flying, as seen in a video taken by passenger Sammy Solstad.
Solstad’s video of the flight’s severe turbulence has since gone viral online. In the chaotic video, people are heard screaming as he shouts, “Help her up!”
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Solstad, a Swede by birth, but an American by choice, spoke with FOX Business about his harrowing experience onboard the flight.
“We come in over Greenland and we see turbulence and nothing crazy,” Solstad said. “Everything is not like usual, you know, it’s always a little bit [turbulent], but my wife woke me up and she was concerned and said, ‘it shakes a lot.’ And I said, ‘it’s going to be okay.’ We also run a YouTube channel called Snipers where we basically let people come along on our adventures.”
“So, okay, I’ll take a little video because people start screaming, and they start to be pretty rough. But I thought everything was okay and right when I took that video – that is the video you see when the people fly up [to] the roof or on the ceiling – and when that happened I realized, OK, this is maybe actually pretty bad,” Solstad said.
It was at this moment, captured on video, that a passenger was thrown onto the ceiling.
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“I saw this lady from Belgium that flew up [to] the ceiling and back on the floor,” Solstad said. “You can see her a little bit in the video. You see her head and [it] was flying up, and then you see the feet after that coming up, too. And she was just lying there, and the staff didn’t do anything because we were totally falling [down at] that time. And I just couldn’t let her lie there. So in the video, you hear me screaming that they need to pick her up and nobody did anything.”
According to Solstad, instead of landing in nearby Canada, the plane was rerouted for five hours over the open ocean before finally touching down in Copenhagen for inspection.
“We only had about, I don’t know, 30 minutes to the Canadian airport where we could emergency land, but the pilots said they were not allowed to because SAS wanted them to fly back to Scandinavia, so they can’t repair an airplane there,” Solstad said. “And we had, like I said, about 30 minutes to Canada for emergency landing. We had five hours back over an open ocean to Copenhagen. And that’s when the panic started in the cabin and everybody freaked out because we were going to sleep on a compromised airplane for five hours over the Atlantic Ocean instead of 20, 30 minutes and emergency land somewhere.”
SAS shared in a statement to CNN that the passengers were given hotel rooms and assisted with rebooking other flights upon landing. There were no reported injuries.
SAS, the parent company for Scandinavian Airlines, did not immediately respond to FOX Business’ request for comment.
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