Several Affected as Turbulence Strikes Delta Flight into Sydney, Australia

A number of individuals have been injured when a Delta Airlines aircraft from LA to Sydney, Australia encountered significant turbulence Friday morning.

Flight DL41 "experienced a brief period of turbulence" as it made its approach and landed at the Sydney airport, a company official informed. Four flight attendants were injured.

Local paramedics reported they treated a total of five people, and transported a trio to hospital with relatively minor issues that such as spinal discomfort and migraines. The injured spanned from their 30s up to the 70s.

The event represents the most recent case of planes experiencing atmospheric disturbance, with researchers pointing out that shifting climate patterns is a significant contributor.

On board were nearly 250 travelers and 15 crew members on the Airbus A350, the representative said, adding that the plane arrived "without further incident" at the airport at 6:48 a.m. local time on Friday.

Emergency responders indicated they received a call just only 180 seconds before the plane arrived, and response teams were standing by on the runway.

The reasons turbulence is getting more common - and more severe.

In the previous year, two dozen individuals were injured when a Delta Airlines flight, on a route from Salt Lake City, Utah to Amsterdam, Netherlands, encountered "significant" turbulence just a couple of hours into the long-haul flight, and had to make an unscheduled landing.

Recently, passengers and crew on a Singapore Airlines jet endured a harrowing brief five-second period of extreme instability. A traveler died and numerous people sustained injuries, as individuals not fastened in rose out of their seats and crashed back down.

In-flight turbulence is a common occurrence on aircraft journeys, and while instances of strong or severe turbulence are reportedly becoming more frequent, they are remained quite uncommon.

Estimates show that there are approximately five thousand cases of severe or worse turbulence every year, out of a sum of more than 35 million flights that now take off globally.

Severe turbulence is categorized as when the sudden jolts of a plane passing through unstable air generate in excess of 1.5 times the force of gravity on your body - enough to throw you from your seat if you did not have on a seatbelt.

As global warming modifies the conditions in the sky, specialists caution that air travel could become less smooth: shifts in temperature and altered air currents in the upper atmosphere are expected to increase the frequency and intensity of significant turbulence.