One thing that’s happened in the past couple of years along that air corridor is the squeezing of flight paths out of Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, and Afghan airspace.
Planes taking more circuitous routes, giving them less options to avoid weather conditions, much of the flight over hot mountainous terrain… could be a contributing factor to increasing incidents of dangerous turbulence affecting flights, even if the conditions themselves haven’t become more common.
(Also consider that the principal question the article tries to answer is not "are there more CAT incidents?" but simply "is there more CAT?")
I glanced at a few current (as of today) routes, e.g. CDG->SIN[0], which don't fly anywhere near the areas of heavy CAT noted by the heat maps. Hell, let's take a look at the flight mentioned, the LHR-SIN SQ321[1], where a passenger died in may (though, as the article notes, it was later determined not to be CAT): that one doesn't fly through any high-CAT areas (and in fact does fly through Russian airspace).
> giving them less options to avoid weather conditions
The entire characterization of CAT is that it is unavoidable because the cause often doesn't have all that much to do with weather conditions, and even when it does, you don't get (enough) advance warning.
[0] https://www.flightstats.com/v2/flight-tracker/SQ/335?year=20...
[1] https://www.flightstats.com/v2/flight-tracker/SQ/321?year=20...
The reason it is top-rated is because it sounds extremely reasonable. This is enough for most people.
I am not judging on whether the comment is correct or not, just answering why it is top-rated. I find nothing weird about it.
OK but you'll need a citation for your assertion and that is only about reported CAT via media sources and not what the article is on about - CAT events worldwide.
The article invokes evidence across the entire planet and cites Prosser et al with 1979 vs 2020 graphics, evidence and discussion. It also concludes that jet streams are where CAT events are intensifying.
It cites data from several years ago (before the recent spate of stories) that only talks about increases in CAT-conducive conditions, but says nothing about increases in actual incidents. The article leaves maybe the impression that any recent spike in high profile turbulence events might be a result of the changes in jet stream activity but doesn’t actually provide much justification for that. Other posts on this thread point out that there was no actual increase in reported CAT encounters that correlates with the proposed mechanism so… unclear if the article’s data says much if anything about recent media-reported CAT events.
Well the study in the link has a chart of some sort of duration weighted probability of CAT (which somehow ranges from 0 to 2.5 instead of 0 to 1?), which would correct for the total volume of flights because it’s a ratio. It’s more likely that the jet streams are getting more turbulent due to climate change.
I don't know if there are other factors which might be masking a rise in incidence of CAT from accident stats?
If you actually read the short paper you'll find they actually used reanalysis data sampled at a rate of every three hours across 42 years to compute their statistics:
> Global ERA5 reanalysis data (Hersbach et al., 2020) [...] were extracted on the 197 hPa pressure level with 0.25° horizontal resolution at three hourly intervals from 1 January 1979 to 31 December 2020. To allow the computation of CAT diagnostics that require vertical derivatives, fields on the 188 and 206 hPa levels were also extracted. The 21 turbulence diagnostics were then calculated from the extracted reanalysis fields every three hours.
How you go from that to "they just looked at 2 years" is beyond me.
What is demonstrably increasing is CAT, due to climate change. But considering how infrequent these incidents are we might not see a clear increase for several decades.
I’m also surprised that these airplanes have on demand satellite TV streaming to these airplanes but airlines claim that it costs 100k to add that to existing planes. There’s just no way it’s 100k per plane - there must be a cheap way to retrofit the data without having it be reliable since it’s opportunistic. And heck, France is doing it every 4 minutes for their planes so why can’t Americans figure out how to do it.
[1] There's a speed limit for turbulence penetration, chosen such that the wings will stall, rather than over-stress the airframe.
> The report includes an important discussion of the risk to unrestrained occupants onboard aircraft, including flight attendants – who account for nearly 80% of those seriously injured in turbulence-related accidents. Key recommendations in the report are intended to help ensure better protections for flight attendants
... which makes me think of two more possibilities:
1 - I suspect any careless flight attendant involved in a turbulence-related accident would learn their lesson after the first time, and take better safety precautions. Perhaps that is a stabilizing factor on the number of accidents, since the number of flight attendants who need to learn that lesson the hard way is probably more a function of how many new flight attendants enter the field than it is a product of how much turbulence there is.
2 - Flight attendants under-report minor accidents so they don't get into trouble for not respecting safety rules
Of course, this is pure speculation (and assuming that the premise of there being more CAT incidents holds up), I'm sure the actual document goes into this kind of thing in more detail but I don't have the time to dig through 115 papers.
They are briefed, no need to learn their lessons after the first time. However, it's part of their job to walk around the plane (eg to serve food), and so they're less likely to be seated than pax. That is the (rather obvious) explanation for the fact that they constitute a very high proportion of victims, not "careless"ness.
I was under the impression that, as the poles are MORE affected by global warming, the jet stream is becoming weaker? is that incorrect?
The projected warming at the North Pole is much stronger than the projected warming at the equator, decreasing the temperature gradient. However the moisture carrying capacity of air increases exponentially with temperature. Since the equator starts warmer, a given change in temperature has a bigger effect on moisture carrying capacity. It turns out that heating up the equator by one degree Celsius and the North Pole by 2 degrees Celsius increases the moisture capacity gradient, despite the temperature gradient dropping. And that increasing moisture capacity gradient strengthens the jet stream.
(at least that's the intuitive reason they were probably going for. In reality there are many factors and a good bit of "if we simulate it this keeps happening")
(Edit: though apparently the additional moisture in the Tropics more than counteracts any reduction in temperature difference: see link in Retric's comment)
...but I fully agree with the rest of your comment.
The truth is there are many oscillations and teleconnections(themselves being impacted by global warming) which influences this temperature gradient on a local/seasonal basis. QBO, El Nino/La Nina and mountain torque events to name a few can move and shift heat at the tropopause in a short period of time and is why we see this wider variance at both ends of the spectrum.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/202...
The poles warm FASTER than the equator. Thus, the global temperature gradients are getting smaller.
And as a result, not only does the Jetstream weaken: as a result, weather patterns become more stable which leads to greater continuous periods of draught or flooding.
“The new study, by University of Chicago Professor Tiffany Shaw and NSF NCAR scientist Osamu Miyawaki, uses climate models to show that climate change intensifies this density contrast because moisture levels for air above the tropics will increase more than above the poles.”
https://news.ucar.edu/132935/jet-stream-winds-will-accelerat....
The article cites the Prosser Report which contradicts this claim, but I find it hard to understand how this could be true for very long. Why wouldn't the atmosphere stabilize as gradients diminish?
Now I know that it's the perfect name for a space pirate ship.
What does authenticating have to do with it? Is there doubt about data providence?
This type of technology would be incredible in my opinion, and I’m also of the opinion that increased turbulence (assuming it is actually increasing) could be easily tied to climate change and the recent warming of the pacific and Atlantic oceans due to regulations on sulfur in cargo ship fuel (but that’s a tangent to this topic)
That said, experiencing light chop on a modern large airplane presents no danger to the airframe or properly secured passengers. You really should be strapped in, though, especially if you're on a small plane. Wake turbulence, for example, actually does present a significant risk to smaller aircraft.
Other people will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the last time a large commercial airliner was lost to turbulence was 1966. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911
Wild how far we've come.
A 40 foot drop is pretty scary; by comparison, an NCAA dive platform is 33 feet.
This isn't to say either of those things really happen just it sometimes sure seems like it.
Two top level. You suck
Whether it's responsible for more CAT - who knows?
In a word, yes. Recent studies have shown a significant increase in the frequency and intensity of CAT conditions over the past few decades. This increase is linked to several factors, most notably climate change."
We've had this invisible hand of the market to regulate ourselves. Now we have the invisible hand of the planet. It won't be a fun ride either.
Also worth noting that to a passenger, CAT is the worst feeling you’ll have on most flights — the “oh shit we’re not flying anymore” vibe is real bad, and usually when you hit proper air again, the sudden jerk feels bad as well.
As someone with like 8 flight hours to my name, I’ll say to a learning pilot, stalling feels much worse than CAT would, it’s a different sort of not flying, it’s like “oh shit the plane forgot how to fly, what now”.
Obviously the wings need to lock into place for landing, and many structural elements of the craft would need to be redesigned.
Oh, excellent the altitudes that 99% of aircraft fly at, unaffecting the ultra rich who fly private jets at 40,000k-50,000k+.
I didn't realize private jets fly so high. What's the reason for the difference in elevations?
Most private jets aren't someone flying a billionaire around in a $60M Gulfstream, they're $3M toys being flown around by the owner to go to their ski trip.
