Passengers violently ejected from seats on turbulent flight

Dozens of people were violently slammed off the ceiling of a jetliner that encountered unexpected and intense turbulence over the Pacific Ocean Thursday.

An Air Canada flight to Australia made an emergency landing in Honolulu after 37 people were injured, nine seriously, during the sudden loss of altitude that sent people flying into the luggage compartments and aisles of the airplane.

The flight from Vancouver to Sydney encountered "un-forecasted and sudden turbulence," about two hours past Hawaii when the plane diverted to Honolulu, Air Canada spokeswoman Angela Mah said in a statement.

"The plane just dropped," passenger Stephanie Beam told The Associated Press. "When we hit turbulence, I woke up and looked over to make sure my kids were buckled. The next thing I knew there's just literally bodies on the ceiling of the plane."
He said when they hit the violent turbulence, "everybody who was not seated and belted in hit the roof, almost everybody in our cabin."
Williams described the cabin afterward as frightening, with plastic lying around and oxygen masks dangling. "A lot of blood everywhere," he said. "It was really quite scary."
"Then all of a sudden the plane dropped and went sideways," Szucs said, and people who weren't strapped in "flew, hit the ceiling."
He said the pilot came on the radio and said they didn't see the turbulence on radar and had "no warning this kind of air drop was going to happen."