In March, Ingrid Weisse, her husband and two young sons were aboard Alaska Airlines 889 from Portland, Ore., on a flight home to Hawaii when the Boeing 737 began buffeting so fiercely that it felt as if the plane would shake itself apart.
"It got really, really violent," says Weisse. There was lots of screaming in the cabin. A flight attendant was hit by an ice bucket that became a projectile. So many people got sick from the sudden changes in altitude that flight attendants had to hand out more vomit bags, she says. Midway through the approximately 45-minute ordeal, one frightened passenger yelled out, "Please tell us this is normal!"
