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Andrew Davies was on his way to New Zealand to work on a Doctor Who exhibition, for which he was project manager. The first leg of his flight from London to Singapore was fairly smooth. Then suddenly the plane hit severe turbulence.

"Being on a rollercoaster is the only way I can describe it," he recalls. "After being pushed into my seat really hard, we suddenly dropped. My iPad hit me in the head, coffee went all over me. There was devastation in the cabin with people and debris everywhere.

"People were crying and [there was] just disbelief about what had happened."

Mr Davies was, he says, "one of the lucky ones".

Other passengers were left with gashes and broken bones. Geoff Kitchen, who was 73, died of a heart attack.

Death as a consequence of turbulence is extremely rare. There are no official figures but there are estimated to have been roughly four deaths since 1981. Injuries, however, tell a different story.

In the US alone, there have been 207 severe injuries - where an individual has been admitted to hospital for more than 48 hours - since 2009, official figures from the National Transportation Safety Board show. (Of these, 166 were crew and may not have been seated.)

But as climate change shifts atmospheric conditions, experts warn that air travel could become bumpier: temperature changes and shifting wind patterns in the upper atmosphere are expected to increase the frequency and intensity of severe turbulence.

"We can expect a doubling or tripling in the amount of severe turbulence around the world in the next few decades," says Professor Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading.

"For every 10 minutes of severe turbulence experienced now, that could increase to 20 or 30 minutes."

So, if turbulence does get more intense, could it become more dangerous too - or are there clever ways that airlines can better "turbulence-proof" their planes?

Severe turbulence is defined as when the up and down movements of a plane going through disturbed air exert more than 1.5g-force on your body - enough to lift you out of your seat if you weren't wearing a seatbelt.

Estimates show that there are around 5,000 incidents of severe-or-greater turbulence every year, out of a total of more than 35 million flights that now take off globally.

Of the severe injuries caused to passengers flying throughout 2023 - almost 40% were caused by turbulence, according to the annual safety report by the International Civil Aviation Organization.

The route between the UK and the US, Canada and the Caribbean is among the areas known to have been affected. Over the past 40 years, since satellites began observing the atmosphere, there has been a 55% increase in severe turbulence over the North Atlantic.

But the frequency of turbulence is projected to increase in other areas too according to a recent study - among them, parts of East Asia, North Africa, North Pacific, North America and the Middle East.

There are three main causes of turbulence: convective (clouds or thunderstorms), orographic (air flow around........

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