TURBULENCE

‘Firm Landing’ Leaves Flight Attendant With Broken Back

The Southwest employee was unable to move and thought the 737 had crashed.

A Southwest Airlines flight attendant was left with a brutal bone fracture in her back after a hard landing in California last month, federal safety investigators say. She suffered a compression fracture of one of her vertebrae during the landing at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana—a touchdown that was so rough that the attendant believed the plane had crashed, the National Transportation Safety Board said. The woman, who was sitting in a jump seat at the back of the plane during the landing, couldn’t move and felt pain in her neck and back before she was rushed to hospital, where the injury was confirmed. None of the other 141 people on board the Boeing 737-700 were hurt in the landing. The NTSB did not say what had caused the unusually hard impact but pilots told investigators they were aiming to land in the normal touchdown zone of the relatively short runway. “However, it ended up being a firm landing,” the NTSB said in its report.