For me it is a matter of the type of motion. On ships if it is a rolling motion it does not bother me as long as I stay away from the outside of the ship. I was in a storm once where the ship was rolling over 40 degrees. I had to tie myself in my rack to sleep. But I did not get sick. Now if the ship is climbing waves and dropping that is a different matter. The I stay aft as much as possible.
My 1st airplane flight was to Hawaii and I knew nothing about air sickness. But the moment the plane went from level flight and started descending I felt it in my stomach. I asked for a cold pack but it was too late for them to get me a decent one. But the time we landed I was a complete mess. I did not throw up, but my wife had to guide me off the plane and out of the airport to the hotel.
Just before getting sick I will fell a hot flash coming on. It is like heat starting at my neck and going up to the top of my head. If I can get a good Ice pack before I get sick I can put getting sick off for quite a while. Another trick is when they come around asking what drink I want I tell them ginger air and please leave the can. I was on one flight where it got so rough that they quit serving the drinks. But a steward still made it a point of giving me ginger ale. Also no matter how worm or cold the plane is I turn sthe air vent on my face full blast.
My father was one of those annoying people who never get seasick. Of course, he joined the Navy. Unfortunately, I seem to have gotten the seasickness (and airsickness) tendency that he missed. I found out about it on my uncle’s cabin cruiser on the Salish Sea when I was a teenager. I started to feel queasy and went to go downstairs, I mean “below decks”, to lie down, but my aunt said, “No, stay up here and keep your eyes on the horizon.”
This makes sense if it’s the inconsistency between sensory inputs that leads to nausea. Which would explain why I felt nauseous when travelling on the Chi-cheemaun ferry on a beautiful day with calm water. But i was sitting inside with no view of the water, and I guess there was enough of a roll to the ship to make a difference.
And I’ve been airsick as well. In no case was this fear; I’m fascinated by boats and planes, and not afraid of heights. (I’ll get to the top of something, look down, and point: “What’s that?” Meanwhile everyone else is staring wide-eyed, unable to speak…)
I’m certain it is. I used to fly fairly often. And i can’t recall ever noticing passengers being sick, except once. I was on a puddle-jumper, and we took off early (like 45 minutes early) to leave before a storm hit. That turned out to be a good move on the part of the airline, as that storm shut down airports in the Midwest (including Chicago) for more than a day. But oh my God was there turbulence.
That was pre 9/11, and i was in the front and could see the pilots and the window they looked out of. That’s the only reason i didn’t lose my lunch. They literally steered around the nastiest stuff, too. But behind me, nearly half the passengers were retching. Oh, and because we left early, they hadn’t restocked the barf bags, so not every seat had one. It was a mess.
Small airplanes have vastly more reaction to turbulence than do large ones. And statistically speaking spend far more of their time in less-than-fully smooth air.
As I’ve told before, a few decades ago I spent a few months flying “puddle-jumpers” giving air tours in the Grand Canyon. Where the goal was to stay close-ish to the beautiful, rugged terrain. Which is the aerial equivalent of white-water rafting: going where the air is most stirred up and staying there for the best part of an hour.
Vomit stories were legion among the pilots. My personal record was 32 bags of puke. From 9 passengers. Some, like @susan just above were remarkably discreet. Others were everywhere.
Amazingly, there is such a thing as too much discretion, as embarrassed folks tried everything to hide their partly-to-mostly filled bag. Some were far more creative than I ever expected. The only thing worse than finding a bag of puke after a flight is finding one after it’s been simmering in the desert heat for a few hours, then burst or leaked into some crevice of the cabin interior where it had been cleverly stuffed.
I worked or several years in rural Indonesia. I found that most of the older villagers did not have cars and were unfamiliar with the interior set up of them. They would travel long distances on dangerous roads, 10-20 people in the open back of a truck, quite happy. If they absolutely had to travel inside a vehicle they were spitting in 4-5 minutes and full on vomiting soon after.
The younger men grew up watching motoring on TV…they travel with no stomach problems, but I have noticed they seem to get more ear pain with air pressure changes when flying than seasoned fliers do.
I’m lucky to be highly resistant to motion sickness. But I’ve heard (from folks involved with the “Vomit Comet”) that essentially no one is entirely immune.
And I’ve done just enough “hard” aerobatic flight to know that there are definite limits to what I can handle.
Yeah. I rode that bus a number of times. There was always a party going on in the back, usually with a case or two of beer, and the gang in the back was generous with the beer, even with strangers like me. The driver was glad to collect fares, but if you didn’t have one, he generally didn’t care–it was easier to just drive, than to get into a conflict with drunks. And it was indeed the “Vomit Comet,” as there was always somebody barfing out the window.
I think it’s hard to fix air sickness because it’s built into us at such a basic level, for evolutionarily good reasons.
It’s hard to make ears work well. Hearing is one of the most difficult things to keep working well through your whole life. One of the ways ears are vulnerable is that many toxins will affect them.
Therefore, when we start to consume something toxic, one of the earliest likely signs is dizziness.
It’s bad to keep absorbing whatever is toxic. So, evolution has favored a nausea response to dizziness. When you get dizzy, you’re inclined to vomit.
Keeping ourselves oriented with respect to gravity, and monitoring our angular accelerations, is complicated business. We use ears, eyes, touch, proprioception, we bring a lot to the analysis. When what your eyes tell you about your environment disagrees with what your ears tell you, it sets off a bit of alarm, indicating that balance isn’t working right. Dizziness. We didn’t evolve to be inside of closed vehicles.
That whole chain of phenomena work together to get us from being in a moving vehicle to disgorging our stomach contents.
They provide rain forecasts for here that go out a good bit more than three days. But even on the morning of the day, whether it’ll rain at all on any particular farm, let alone how much, is often very uncertain.
I’m sure pilots can do more to avoid turbulence now than they could 50 years ago. But I very much doubt that avoidance can be perfect.