Severe turbulence forced an airplane into an emergency landing on Monday. Nearly 40 people were injured on the Air Europa Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane. It was flying from Spain to Uruguay. Turbulence hit the plane over the Atlantic, as it neared South America. Air traffic controllers told the pilot to make an emergency landing in Natal, in north-eastern Brazil. Many of the injured were treated at a hospital in Natal. Other injured people completed their journey to Uruguay's capital city Montevideo by bus. Air Europa sent a new plane from Madrid on Monday. It flew passengers who chose not to take the bus to their final destination. The turbulence is the latest in a string of mid-air occurrences to injure many people.

Turbulence is the violent or unsteady movement of air. Modern aircraft are designed to survive strong winds and dangerous pockets of air. It is extremely rare for turbulence to damage an airplane. It is even rarer for it to cause a plane to crash. The biggest danger to passengers comes from not wearing a seat belt. Anyone standing up in the airplane, or not wearing a seat belt while seated, can be thrown around the cabin. They can suffer bad injuries by hitting their head on overhead lockers or on the plane's ceiling. Scientists from Reading University in the UK reported that severe turbulence is getting worse because of climate change. They said incidents increased by 55 per cent between 1979 and 2020.