Six Injured When Smaller Jet Hit Invisible Turbulence From An Emirates A380 Flying 9 Miles Ahead

Five passengers and one flight attendant were lightly injured, so this is a serious incident, but it’s one where I find the geometry absolutely fascinating.

On Saturday, May 30, 2026, Eurowings flight 635 from Rhodes, Greece to Cologne, Germany ran into wake turbulence from the aircraft ahead of it. The Airbus A320 was at about 36,000 feet, around 23 miles east of Sarajevo, when air traffic control cleared it to climb to 38,000 feet – behind Emirates flight 1, an Airbus A380 from Dubai to London, which was already at 38,000 feet about 9 miles in front.

As the Lufthansa subsidiary’s A320 climbed through 37,600 feet it encountered wake turbulence from the A380 ahead. The crew stopped the climb and quickly returned to 36,000 feet.

Inside the cabin, a flight attendant was thrown into the ceiling of the cabin. The flight continued to Cologne, where medical personnel met the aircraft. The Eurowings aircraft stayed on the ground in Cologne for about 4.5 hours and its next flight departed about 3.5 hours late. The Emirates flight continued to Heathrow without incident.

• The Eurowings Airbus A320 appears to have been outside the A380 separation minimum: ICAO guidance cited in the reports gives 8 miles for an A380 ahead of an A320 at the same altitude or up to 1,000 feet below.

• Wake turbulence isn’t engine exhaust, it’s the byproduct of lift. As I taught my daughter, a wing makes lift by creating lower pressure above the wing and higher pressure below it. Air curls around the wingtips and rolls into two long, counter-rotating vortices trailing behind the aircraft, like two invisible horizontal tornadoes.

• Every aircraft creates them, but the strongest wakes come from the heaviest aircraft – like an Airbus A380. Widebodies are generally referred to as “Heavy” after their callsign. The A380 is “Super.”

• Those vortices sink, drift with the wind, and decayat several hundred feet per minute, but atmospheric conditions can move them horizontally or vertically. They can last several minutes, and a smaller aircraft following a heavier one at the same level or just below creates a risk. Minimum wake separation reduces this risk, but as these flights show it doesn’t eliminate it.

By Kentaro Iemoto from Tokyo, Japan, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The Eurowings Airbus A320 likely intersected the Emirates A380’s descending wake. That doesn’t appear to have damaged the aircraft, but it created turbulence that injured crew and likely unbelted passengers. (Always wear your seatbelt when seated.)

Wake turbulence exists behind every aircraft. The biggest risk is usually managing it around takeoff and landing, when aircraft are spaced closer together and traveling slower. However enroute encounters are documented semi-regularly.

• One study of upper European airspace found 26 such wake incidents between 2009 and 2012, and estimated it happens about once every 38 days.

• In January 2017, a Bombardier Challenger lost control over the Arabian Sea about a minute after an Emirates Airbus A380 passed overhead in the opposite direction 1,000 feet above it. The business jet dropped about 9,000 feet, rolled through several rotations, and diverted to Muscat with two seriously injured passengers. The plane had to be scrapped.

• In 2001, American Airlines 587 from New York JFK to Santo Domingo encountered wake from a Japan Airlines 747 after departure and crashed after excessive rudder applied by the first officer in response, producing loads beyond the vertical stabilizer’s design capability.

The Eurowings incident with an Airbus A380 is unusual – operating at what appears to have been a normal, albeit close distance, resuling in injuries.

(HT: Paddle Your Own Kanoo)