AUSTIN – Texas actor Matthew McConaughey and his wife Camila Alves McConaughey were on board a Lufthansa flight from Austin that experienced “significant turbulence.”
On Instagram, Camila Alves McConaughey shared her experience with the “chaos” aboard Flight 469, which left Austin on Wednesday night for Frankfurt, Germany.
At 37,000 feet over Tennessee, the Airbus A330 reported turbulence and was diverted to Dulles International Airport in the Washington D.C. area, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. See photos from passengers in the video player above.
Seven people were taken to area hospitals with injuries believed to be minor. There were 172 passengers on board the plane.
Lufthansa told the Associated Press the turbulence happened 90 minutes after takeoff.
Camila Alves McConaughey posted that according to a pilot, the plane dropped about 4,000 feet in a short amount of time.
“Everything was flying everywhere,” she posted, along with a short video of a mess in the aisle. The video showed food and towels on the floor, as flight attendants were in dinner service.
She said the flight was “chaos” and ”the turbulence (kept) on coming.”
“Thank God everyone was safe and ok,” she said. She added that the passengers stayed at a nearby Marriott hotel, and she and Matthew McConaughey made it to the bar with “1 minute before closing.”
Camila Alves McConaughey thanked the hotel and airline staff. They boarded a flight to Germany on Thursday, she said.
Turbulence continues to be a major cause of accidents and injuries during flight, according to a 2021 National Transportation Safety Board report. Turbulence accounted for 37.6% of all accidents on larger commercial airlines between 2009 and 2018.
Turbulence is essentially unstable air that moves in an unpredictable fashion. Most people associate it with heavy storms. But the most dangerous type is clear-air turbulence, which can be hard to predict and often gives no visible warning in the sky ahead.