Several Injured as Turbulence Strikes A Delta Airlines Flight into Sydney, Australia

Multiple passengers and crew have been injured when a Delta Airlines aircraft traveling from LA to Sydney, Australia was hit by turbulence on Friday morning.

Flight DL41 "experienced a brief period of turbulence" as it touched down at the Sydney airport, a company official stated. Several cabin crew members were injured.

Emergency medical services said they treated five individuals, and took three of them to a medical facility with non-life-threatening injuries that included pain in the back and headaches. The patients' ages spanned from their 30s to 70s.

This marks the most recent case of planes being hit by turbulence, with aviation specialists indicating that climate change is a significant contributor.

On board were nearly 250 travelers and 15 crew members on the Airbus A350, the official noted, adding that the plane arrived "safely" at the airport at 6:48 a.m. local time on Friday morning.

Emergency responders said they were alerted just three minutes before the plane touched down, and emergency vehicles were waiting on the tarmac.

The reasons turbulence is growing increasingly prevalent - and often stronger.

Last year, 25 people were injured when a separate Delta aircraft, on a route from Salt Lake City, Utah to Amsterdam, encountered "significant" turbulence just a couple of hours into the long-haul flight, and was forced to make an emergency landing.

Earlier this year, passengers and crew on a certain international flight experienced a terrifying short but intense bout of severe turbulence. An individual passed away and many were hurt, as unbelted passengers were thrown from their seats and crashed back down.

Turbulence is fairly routine during flights, and while occurrences of significant turbulence appear to be increasing, they are statistically infrequent.

Data suggests that there are approximately 5,000 incidents of significant in-flight disturbance every year, out of a overall number of in excess of 35 million aircraft departures that currently occur around the world.

Strong atmospheric disturbance is described as when the up and down movements of a plane passing through unstable air exert more than 1.5g-force on your body - a strong enough force to propel you from your seat if you did not have on a restraint.

As climate change alters the conditions in the sky, researchers alert that flying could become more turbulent: warming trends and altered air currents in the upper atmosphere are likely to increase the regularity and severity of dangerous in-flight bumps.