As Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 plummeted around 6,000 feet over Myanmar in May 2024, Geoff, 73, fell on top of his wife, crushing her into the armrest. A doctor on board administered CPR and Linda was taken to a Bangkok hospital.
It was two days before she learned her husband had died — suffering a heart attack during the extreme turbulence. She spent 10 days in hospital before being airlifted back to Bristol with a broken back, the BBC reports.
“When I got separated from Geoff, I knew he was in a bad way, but nothing prepared me for hearing he had died,” Linda told the BBC. “It was absolutely devastating.”
Now, more than two years later, Linda has filed proceedings at London’s High Court seeking damages from Singapore Airlines. Her aviation lawyer, Anthe Korelidou, indicates the case centers not only on compensation for Linda’s ongoing physical injuries and need for specialist support, but also on unanswered questions about what happened and whether more could have been done to prevent Geoff’s death.
“All Linda wants is for the most thorough investigations to be conducted,” Korelidou said.
What the official investigation found
Singapore’s Transport Safety Investigation Bureau (TSIB) published its final report into the SQ321 incident in May 2026 — nearly two years after the event, according to AsiaOne. Both pilots reported no weather radar returns on their displays in the 15 minutes before impact, and neither saw clouds when looking out the cockpit window — while four nearby aircraft noted widespread clouds over Myanmar.
“The investigation team is unable to understand why the flight crew of the occurrence flight did not see the widespread clouds,” TSIB stated. One theory is the aircraft’s weather radar may have malfunctioned. TSIB noted the aircraft had logged similar radar anomalies on three separate occasions before the incident.
According to the Singapore Ministry of Transport’s preliminary findings, the turbulence caused vertical acceleration to swing from negative 1.5G to positive 1.5G within four seconds — sending unbelted passengers airborne and then slamming them back down. The aircraft dropped 178 feet in 4.6 seconds.
80 passengers were injured, and Geoff Kitchen was the only fatality.
