A Number of Injured as Rough Air Hits Delta Aircraft into Sydney

Multiple passengers and crew have been injured when a Delta Airlines jet traveling from Los Angeles to Sydney experienced rough air Friday morning.

Flight DL41 "went through a short bout of rough air" as it landed at Sydney Airport, a representative for the carrier told. Four flight attendants were injured.

Emergency medical services stated they assessed a total of five people, and transferred a trio to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries that included spinal discomfort and headaches. The patients' ages spanned from their 30s up to the 70s.

This marks the latest incident of aircraft being hit by turbulence, with researchers pointing out that climate change is a key driver.

On board were 245 passengers and 15 crew members on the wide-body jet, the representative noted, clarifying that the plane touched down "without further incident" at Sydney Airport at 6:48 a.m. local time on Friday.

The NSW Ambulance Service indicated they received a call just three minutes ahead of the plane arrived, and response teams were waiting on the tarmac.

The reasons turbulence is growing more frequent - and more severe.

In the previous year, two dozen individuals were injured when another Delta jet, on a route from Salt Lake City, Utah to Amsterdam, encountered "severe" rough air just 120 minutes into the transoceanic journey, and had to make an unscheduled landing.

Recently, passengers and crew on a Singapore Airlines jet experienced a frightening brief five-second of severe turbulence. A traveler died and numerous people sustained injuries, as unbelted passengers lifted out of their seats and crashed back down.

Bumpy air is fairly routine during flights, and while instances of significant turbulence seem to be rising, they are still very rare.

Research indicates that there are an estimated five thousand cases of severe-or-greater turbulence annually, out of a sum of over 35 million aircraft departures that are conducted worldwide.

Severe turbulence is defined as when the vertical motions of a plane going through rough air masses exert more than a significant G-force on your body - a strong enough force to lift you out of your seat if you did not have on a seatbelt.

As global warming shifts atmospheric conditions, specialists caution that air travel could become bumpier: temperature changes and shifting wind patterns in the upper atmosphere are projected to heighten the frequency and intensity of severe turbulence.