Lufthansa flight attendant told passengers to delete all videos and photos after severe turbulence forced an emergency landing

• The crew on board a Lufthansa flight that hit “severe turbulence” told passengers to delete photos and videos they had, passengers say.

• One passenger told Insider that flight attendants instructed them twice to delete all evidence of the cabin.

• The flight turned into chaos after the plane dropped suddenly, injuring seven people.

The crew on the Lufthansa flight that had to make an emergency landing after hitting “severe turbulence” ordered passengers to delete all the photos and videos they had of the incident, two people on board the flight said.

Rolanda Schmidt was one of the seven people injured aboard the flight and told Insider the plane took a major drop, sending food and personal items flying throughout the cabin.

Lufthansa Flight 469 was headed from Austin, Texas to Frankfurt, Germany on March 1 but ran into what the airline called “severe turbulence” while flying over Tennessee.

Schmidt told Insider that she banged her head on the plastic tray table case on the seat in front of her during the first major drop. Once the plane steadied and started to ascend quickly, she said she flew out of her seat and hit her head again on the aircraft’s ceiling.

“It felt like it hit the eye of a tornado,” Schmidt said. “It would not stop. I thought we were going down.”

She said she was in tears and instead of screaming like other passengers, she prayed, adding that she texted her husband that she was going to die.

“It was one of those moments where within five-to-ten minutes of processing, you knew you were going to die and we didn’t know if we were going to make it safely anywhere,” Schmidt said. “It felt like the insides of your body were being shaken out.”

Schmidt says she sustained a concussion as well as a badly bruised arm and a potentially fractured hip — more severe than the “minor injuries” Lufthansa said a number of passengers faced.

But Schmidt alleged that as the plane descended to Dulles International Airport to make an emergency landing, a flight attendant came on the loudspeaker and said “delete all your pictures and videos.”

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“I think we were all just like, ‘What?!'” Schmidt said.

About five minutes later, Schmidt said the same flight attendant made a second announcement with the same instructions. This time, though, the flight attendant implied it was to protect other passengers’ privacy, Schmidt said.

“That’s not the way that it came across, saying ‘delete all of your pictures’ and all of that,” Schmidt said.

She added that she doesn’t think any of the passengers were trying to take pictures of each other, but instead the mess of items strewn all over the cabin.

Another passenger on board the flight confirmed to Insider that flight crews asked the passengers to delete all their photos.

Lufthansa did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Schmidt was en route to Greece to see her daughter, who is a professional volleyball player, compete in a game.

She said she wanted to turn around right away and go home to her husband in Texas, but because there were tornadoes in her home state, she chose to “have faith” and continue her journey to Europe to avoid any other traumatic flight experiences due to bad weather.

Lufthansa has not indicated what may have caused the turbulence.

Read the original article on Insider