Passengers aboard a recent Hawaiian Airlines flight from Honolulu to Sydney, Australia survived a traumatizing incident that caused several people to be hospitalized. “Unexpected severe turbulence” caused multiple individuals to fly out of their seats during the trip.

According to The New York Post, the distressing trek happened on Friday (June 30), five hours into an 11-hour flight. “The plane just dropped. We weren’t prepared,” passenger Sultan Baskonyali recalled of the Hawaiian Airlines flight. “There was a man in front of us who had gone all the way up. His head was on the roof. And [he] dropped back down,” he continued. The outlet noted that the turbulence caused the plane’s oxygen masks to deploy and part of the aircraft’s ceiling burst open.

Once the plane finally reached its destination, emergency crews were waiting at Sydney’s airport to provide assistance to 163 passengers and 12 crew members who landed “without incident.” Three people were taken to hospitals to be treated for injuries such as back pain. “Our immediate priority is to continue to care for our passengers and crew affected by this turbulence event, and we thank Sydney airport first responders for their swift assistance,” a Hawaiian Airlines spokesperson shared. Officials added that the company “conducted a thorough inspection of the aircraft” before it returned to Honolulu that evening.

This isn’t the first time Hawaiian Airlines has made headlines for an extreme turbulence-related situation. In December 2022, 36 people were hurt during a flight from Phoenix to Honolulu. Of those passengers, around 20 were taken to local hospitals and treated for head injuries, lacerations, bruising and loss of consciousness. Passenger Kaylee Reyes remembered her mother didn’t have a chance to sit and buckle her seatbelt, and “she flew up and hit the ceiling.” “It was a smidge of a rumble of turbulence, and then it was an immediate drop. It felt like Guardians of the Galaxy, just that free-falling. Three minutes of absolute panic,” another passenger, Megan Manning, said in an article published by Phoenix’s Fox 10 News.