A passenger aboard a flight that was hit by severe turbulence said the airline crew asked passengers to delete all footage they took capturing the incident.
On March 1, Lufthansa's flight 469 from Austin, Texas, bound for Frankfurt, Germany, made an emergency landing at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, and seven people on board were taken to area hospitals.
The turbulence hit during the middle of meal service as passengers and crew were moving throughout the cabin. Meals and cutlery were tossed all around and some passengers reported hitting the floor and ceiling.
One of the passengers that were injured, Rolanda Schmidt, said that during the emergency landing, a flight attendant came on the loudspeaker and urged passengers to "delete all your pictures and videos."
Ms Schmidt told Insider that passengers were surprised at the demand: "I think we were all just like, 'What?!'".
The order was repeated in a second announcement that followed five minutes later, according to the passenger.
However, this time the flight attendant implied that the request was in order to protect other passengers' privacy, Ms Schmidt said.
But she added: "That's not the way that it came across, saying 'delete all of your pictures' and all of that."
The Airbus A330 reported severe turbulence at an altitude of 37,000 feet (about 11,300 metres) while flying over Tennessee, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. The agency is investigating.
Passenger Susan Zimmerman, 34, of Austin, Texas, said one of the pilots told the cabin that the plane had fallen about 1,000 feet (about 305 metres) during the sudden turbulence.
“It felt like the bottom just dropped out from underneath,” she said in a phone interview. “Everything was floating up. For a moment, you are weightless.”
The brief but severe clear-air turbulence about 90 minutes after takeoff led to the unscheduled landing as a precaution, Lufthansa said in a statement.
The passengers received medical attention and Lufthansa ground staff were working to rebook travellers, the airline said. There were 172 passengers.
"The safety and well-being of passengers and crew members is Lufthansa’s top priority at all times," the statement said.
Turbulence continues to be a major cause of accidents and injuries during flight, according to a 2021 National Transportation Safety Board report. Turbulence accounted for 37.6% of all accidents on larger commercial airlines between 2009 and 2018.
Turbulence is essentially unstable air that moves in an unpredictable fashion. Most people associate it with heavy storms. But the most dangerous type is clear-air turbulence, which can be hard to predict and often gives no visible warning in the sky ahead.
Storms moved across areas of Tennessee on Wednesday night, creating strong winds in the upper atmosphere, said Scott Unger, a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in Nashville.
“It was very windy aloft, which could easily lead to the possibility of turbulence with any flight,” he said.
