For your safety, and the safety of those around you, keep your seat belt fastened.

For fliers aboard Sunday’s Hawaiian Airlines Flight 35 from Phoenix to Honolulu, that sage advice has never rung truer. The severe turbulence that dropped the plane suddenly while in mid-air injured 36 people, sending 20 of them to local hospitals in a “mass casualty emergency.” Victims suffered head injuries, lacerations, bruising, loss of consciousness and nausea — and images showed bloodied passengers, as well as damaged overhead panels and debris strewn across the aircraft. Most, if not all, of those injured were believed to have been unbuckled at the time of the turbulent drop, which occurred about 30 minutes before the Airbus A330 carrying 278 passengers and 10 crew members was to land. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating.

In the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s “Spotlight Hawaii” webcast on Wednesday, Hawaiian Air CEO Peter Ingram noted that the NTSB probe kept him from saying too much, but did say that a couple of the injured would be facing “a bit of a road to recovery.”

The rarity of air turbulence causing numerous injuries on one flight magnifies questions about how and why it happened. Certainly, the weather forecast for the weekend and the days before had been full of severe weather warnings. In fact, Sunday’s weather conditions had spurred Hawaiian Air to divert three other flights that day bound for Maui, to Oahu: One flight was interisland, two were trans-Pacific.

The NTSB probe will examine what measures were taken, in addition to turning on the seat belt sign, to ensure passengers were buckled in, said Jon Snook, Hawaiian Air’s chief operating officer, in a Sunday afternoon news conference.

An August 2021 NTSB report on preventing turbulence-related injuries on passenger flights underscored that the wearing of seat belts reduces the risk of serious injury. It also found that air traffic control procedures for processing pilot weather reports were “time-consuming and nonstandardized”; further, airlines often share turbulence observations amid their own personnel but not throughout a national airspace system. The NTSB recommended the Federal Aviation Administration update and streamline its systems for collecting and sharing turbulence reports to increase information availability to all airspace users.

Let’s hope the NTSB’s investigation into the Hawaiian Air event will inform better flight policies and procedures for the aviation industry — so that all, as Ingram noted, “learn more about what can make our flights even safer every single day.” Meanwhile, with so much holiday flying going on, remember to remain buckled up whenever seated. As shown Sunday, never underestimate the power of air turbulence.