In a shocking incident reported from the California Airport in the United States last month, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant suffered a compression fracture to a vertebra in her upper back during a hard landing, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal safety investigators. The NTSB said none of the other 141 people on board the plane were injured in the incident at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California after pilots of the Southwest Airlines ended up performing a hard landing on a relatively short runway, as told to investigators.


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The pilots said that they were aiming for the normal touchdown zone on the relatively short runway, “however, it ended up being a firm landing,” the NTSB said in its final report. The landing was so hard that the flight attendant thought the plane had crashed. She felt pain in her back and neck and could not move, and was taken to a hospital where she was diagnosed with the fracture. 


Southwest said in a statement, “We reported the matter to the NTSB in accordance with regulatory requirements and conducted an internal review of the event.” The Boeing 737-700 plane has been making several flights a day, according to tracking services. Shortly after the 18-year-old plane landed and taxied off the runway, the pilots — a 55-year-old captain and 49-year-old co-pilot — were told about the injury to the flight attendant.


She was sitting on the jump seat at the back of the plane. The NTSB, which did not travel to the accident site, has not made its documents from the investigation publicly available. The runway that the plane landed on is only 5,700 feet long (1,700 meters). By comparison, runways at nearby Los Angeles International Airport range between 8,900 and nearly 13,000 feet (2,700 to 3,900 meters).