'All Hell Broke Loose': Passenger Describes Deadly Turbulence On Singapore Airlines Flight

A passenger who was on the Singapore Airlines flight that hit extreme turbulence shared details of the harrowing experience on CNN Tuesday.

The London-Singapore flight, which departed Monday evening, made an emergency landing in Bangkok after plummeting 6,000 feet in about three minutes, leaving a British man dead and dozens of other passengers injured.

Authorities said the man may have died of a heart attack. Six people are hospitalized in critical condition.

Andrew Davies, who was one of the 211 passengers on board, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that the flight started out smoothly. He had eaten a meal and was watching a movie, about nine or 10 hours into the flight, when he saw the seat belt sign come on.

He buckled in right away, he said, “and thank goodness I did, because within moments of doing that, all hell broke loose.”

“The plane just felt like it dropped. It probably only lasted a few seconds, but I remember vividly seeing shoes and iPads and iPhones and cushions and blankets and cutlery and plates and cups flying through the air and crashing into the ceiling,” he recalled.

When the plane leveled off, Davies said, he turned and saw a woman with a large gash in her head.

The passenger who died was sitting right behind him, he added.

“We tended to this gentleman and I helped carry him, get him out of the seat, and we lay him on the floor so that some medical professionals could administer CPR... for at least 20 minutes,” Davies said, adding that the passenger was then pronounced dead at the scene.

When the plane landed, local medics swiftly boarded and tended to the injured, he said, adding that he had been seated next to the deceased man’s wife, who was in “severe shock.”

Davies said many of the passengers showed one another “extraordinary kindness” during the ordeal, and some have exchanged contact details and intend to keep in touch after the terrifying shared experience.

The deceased man has been identified as Geoffrey Kitchen, 73, a musical theater director from southwest England. He was “a gentleman with the utmost honesty and integrity,” the Thornbury Musical Theatre Group in South Gloucestershire said in a statement.