SQ321 LHR-SIN Encountered Severe Turbulence [At least 1 Fatality and 30 Injured]

SCM said:
Man I would be so pissed off - food is like half the reason I fly SQ!

I flew BRU -> SYD a month ago, and in my view they were unnecessarily cautious about pausing service all the time even when there's the tiniest amount of turbulence.

Was this the case on your flight, or you think I guess it was warranted?
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I was in Y so food wasn't necessarily a big deal and I mean I threw up anyway so LOL.

I think it was warranted though.
 
Quickstatus said:
But as discussed above, inflight turbulence is often difficult to predict. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
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Yeh so what do we do? Since you can't predict it, what's the point of pausing service all the time? Surely good service should be the priority.
 
SCM said:
Surely good service should be the priority.
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Hmm, I wonder what would the injured on this flight say?. I thought safety should be the number one priority. In flight cabin service is subordinate.

As discussed previously in this thread, cabin crew are most likely to get injured from turbulence. I would not want cabin crew on my flight to be injured because I expect cabin service while I am safely secured by my seat belt while they are not.

Additionally, I don't want the pilots up the front to second guess themselves with respect to operating the seatbelt sign switch just because there might be a perceived pressure to turn it off.
 
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Quickstatus said:
But as discussed above, inflight turbulence is often difficult to predict. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
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To a degree you're trying to predict it, but you do have a wonderful tool in the coughpit, that is not, as far as I'm aware, available in the cabin.
SCM said:
Yeh so what do we do? Since you can't predict it, what's the point of pausing service all the time? Surely good service should be the priority.
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Safety is the priority. Service should be well and truly subservient to that.
 
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Quickstatus said:
Which involves some intepretation. I wonder if the interpreters were influenced to some degree by the "need to feed the chooks" and some second guessing came into play.
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Quite true, and I've said in the past that I'm less than impressed with the way everyone else (except me) operates it. But, the point is that it does exist in the coughpit only, and you can be using it to find a way around very nasty weather, with severe turbulence only a stones throw away. If you are successful, you'll then have people in the back complaining that the seat belt sign obviously didn't need to be on. Basically you don't have radar there, so you really don't know.
 
jb747 said:
Basically you don't have radar there, so you really don't know.
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I hate being told by patient's next of kin to call them during a case to discuss before continuing. I tell them I can't be involved if I need to confer with them during the procedure and they should leave the clinical decision making to me.

Death from starvation is not a risk on an airplane even with Project Sunrise.
 
Quickstatus said:
I hate being told by patient's next of kin to call them during a case to discuss before continuing. I tell them I can't be involved if I need to confer with them during the procedure and they should leave the clinical decision making to me.
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Ah but the average person looks it up on the internet, whilst on the toilet, and immediately they have the knowledge necessary to 'discuss' things with people who have studied for years.
Quickstatus said:
Death from starvation is not a risk on an airplane even with Project Sunrise.
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Tells a lot about people when they consider their unnecessary meal is more important than someone's safety.
 
jb747 said:
Safety is the priority. Service should be well and truly subservient to that.
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Quickstatus said:
Hmm, I wonder what would the injured on this flight say?. I thought safety should be the number one priority. In flight cabin service is subordinate.
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Hindsight is 20/20, the only way to be truly safe is to lock everyone in carnival-ride style at the start of a flight and keep them that way, nothing less than that will guarantee safety in the event of unexpected turbulence.

Now I'm sure you would agree that solution is too extreme, and we need to find the right balance.

What I'm saying here is, SQ is having a knee-jerk reaction, and the balance is far from correct now.
 
Quickstatus said:
Precisely. I would not know either. There are a group of people up the front who do.
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There is nothing to know - there is no right or wrong answer, every airline will have it's own approach, and if SQ becomes known as the airline of poor service because the seat belt sign is always on, pax will take their business elsewhere.
 
SCM said:
What I'm saying here is, SQ is having a knee-jerk reaction, and the balance is far from correct now.
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What evidence do you have of that?

I've spent 30 of the last 66 hours in the air on SQ including both the northern Pacific and the Bay of Bengal and did not notice the seatbelt sign on unnecessarily nor service suspension in any way that meaningfully impacted service. I also spent 17+ hrs on them earlier in July going SIN-JFK, and did not notice any significant disruption in service. They seem to have an approach more aligned with QF now - basically seat belt sign comes on crew become seated, whereas before there were two degrees of seat belt sign, one for pax and one for everyone.

The most impacted seem to be the second meal on Europe-Singapore services (which I haven't experienced since the incident) and quite frankly I've flown across the Bay of Bengal/Andaman sea enough to know that before we cross the Indian coast (heading east) I make sure I've been to the toilet, stretched my legs and buckled in for the ride. More than happy if it is necessary for crew to complete service by then, regardless of airline (although obviously that is difficult on India-SIN services).
 
SCM said:
there is no right or wrong answer,
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There is only one answer. No cabin crew should get injured because they have to do a meal service or other cabin crew duties and passengers don't get to decide how the SB sign is operated -there is nothing for them to know.

Any pilot interpretation of radar signals has to be in favour of safety not meal service
 
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