Fasten your seat belts. And hold on to them throughout the ride, because turbulence, especially the most insidious that occurs under clear skies,…
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Fasten your seat belts. And hold on to her throughout the ride because the turbulence, especially the more insidious ones that occur in clear air turbulence, will become increasingly common in flight. Climate change has to do with it. The good news is that thanks to increasingly sophisticated weather forecasts and increasingly reliable aircraft, the negative consequences are being reduced. The advice commanders always give during the Flightie the wearing of seat belts, even if it is not mandatory, must be complied with.
Let’s start with the last event. Flight Lufthansa 469. Airbus 330 takes off from Austin, Texas on Wednesday. Destination Frankfurt. All quiet, but suddenly after an hour and a half, 37,000 feet over Tennessee, the plane bucks, loses altitude, passengers who are not in their seats are thrown to the ground along with the flight attendants, as are those without seat belts. Everything happens while the food is being served, so the carts fly from one part of the cabin to another, the food lying around the corridor like a battlefield. One passenger, Susan Zimmerman, told CNN: “First the plane suddenly went up, then we plummeted a thousand feet. It was free fall for five seconds, it was like a roller coaster ride, plates and glasses went to the ceiling.”
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Fortunately, the wind shear lasts relatively little, the commander lands in Washington Dulles, Virginia. Seven wounded. Aviation authorities explain: It was an episode of Cat, clear air turbulence. In 2017, 27 passengers on Aeroflot Moscow-Bangkok flight were injured due to a Cat episode, in 2019 33 passengers were treated for treatment on an Air Canada Vancouver-Sydney aircraft, again due to turbulence in clear air. Between 2009 and 2018, there were 111 turbulence-related incidents, nearly one a month, according to the NTSB. A report cited by Abcnews explains: Most of the seriously injured passengers were standing or unbuckled. According to the FAA, 146 people were injured in the turbulence between 2009 and 2021.
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Fine, but why is open-air turbulence so insidious? Simply because it is unpredictable, it occurs when the sky is clear or there are few clouds. In simplified terms, the cause is related to a temperature gradient, a temperature change at altitude that causes a sudden formation of erratic jet streams. Explains Thomas Guin, Professor of Meteorology, quoted by Abcnews: Turbulence in clear air most commonly occurs in or near high-altitude “rivers” of air called jet streams, in fact the ultimate cause is wind shear, two huge air masses close together others move at different speeds. The plane climbs in one direction, descends in the other. According to Paul D. Williams, a professor of atmospheric sciences in England, quoted by various US networks, climate change is altering the temperature patterns in the upper atmosphere. At flight altitude, the tropics warm faster than the poles, resulting in larger north-south temperature differentials. And that leads to wind shear. The hope is that turbulence avoidance techniques will improve over time, meanwhile it’s better to keep your seat belts on at all times.
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