Relative to car travel, traveling by airplane is a much safer mode of carrying passengers from one place to another (and is often faster, once you take away the long lines in security and the long wait at the gate before boarding). There is almost nowhere in the world that can’t be accessed by plane (we even land planes on Antarctica, so the penguins there can easily migrate for the winter).

[Image courtesy of Flickr user sebastien lebrigand via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user sebastien lebrigand via a Creative Commons license]

Airplanes can get thousands of passengers to their destinations every day without much issue, while there is always a pretty decent chance that a few thousand people in the world will get injured (or worse) in a car during an average traveling day. While airplanes are generally safer than automobiles. at 30,000 feet the dynamic changes – even one small safety misstep can cause several injuries, if not multiple deaths. And up there in the wild blue yonder, there are other factors beyond the control of the pilots or flight attendants that can be unsafe, and often the character of those running the airline and flying the planes get revealed in some of these situations.

One of the most common unpredictables is turbulence. Often, pilots have only a couple minutes of notice that some turbulence is coming, and they often don’t really know the intensity of it until they encounter it. What to do when it gets severe? Some flights just push through and deal with the consequences later. Others will deal with it immediately.

Such was the case recently with an Air Canada flight that left Shanghai, China, en route to Toronto. At one point in the flight, the plane encountered very severe turbulence – so much so that more than 10 percent of the 322 passengers aboard (officially, 34 people) were injured during the turbulent episode. The flight made an emergency landing in Calgary to treat the injured, rather than pushing through to Toronto. Air Canada personnel was in Calgary with medical personnel to make sure the injured got off the plane, and the rest were forwarded on to their destination. All told, about 21 people were physically injured, while 13 others were taken to the hospital for observation (perhaps for head trauma).

While seat belts can certainly help mitigate injuries in flight, this situation shows that it isn’t an airtight protection (pardon the pun … OK, don’t). Severe turbulence can still cause serious issues, but a seatbelt can keep things from being worse by having bodies flying around the cabin and colliding with each other. But this does emphasize the point about making sure you are buckled in at all times when seated on a plane, obey pilot and flight attendant instructions when a turbulent event is about to happen, and make sure to give a “thank you” to the pilot and crew if they do the same thing this Air Canada crew did, and did the sensible thing by getting out of the turbulence as quickly as possible instead of trying to meet some artificial deadline to get to the airport by a certain time.

Getting to the destination is about profits; getting passengers the help they need is about safety. What is your airline’s priority?