flying: seat belts and turbulence-related injuries

[DrCube]

@TSBG

Am I the only one that likes turbulence? It lulls me to sleep.

“Gravel road” turbulence is fine, though I’d prefer smooth sailing myself. But “roller coaster” turbulence makes me freak out. How can you sleep when you’re basically in free fall for thousands of feet, then forcibly caught, violently shaken, and repeat over and over?

[Richard_Pearse]

@Senegoid

? I’ve flown little Cessnas (150, 172) back in the day, and gliders (Schweizer 2-33), and been passenger in some kind of twin-engine 6-seater once – all of them had 4-point harnesses in all of the seats.

Am I calling them by the right terminology? A lap belt in two pieces (left side and right side) and two shoulder straps, one over each shoulder, all coming together in a single buckle right in the center over the pilot’s or passenger’s solar plexus, right?

Terminology is correct. As Broomstick said earlier, “it depends.”

C172, C182 I’ve flown have had belts like this, though much grottier and older ;).

C152 I think was the same but it was a while ago and I may be mistaken. I remember my instructor used to sit with his arm across the back of my seat otherwise we ran out of shoulder room.

Any aerobatic versions of a C152 or C150 would have a 4 or possibly 5 point harness also.

It shouldn’t buckle over the solar plexus by the way, the lap straps should be tight so the buckle sits down low on the tummy. A 5 point harness is easier to get this right with.

I’m not suggesting you are wrong, it’s quite possible that the C150s and C172s you flew had 4 point harnesses.

[Dervorin]

@DrCube

“Gravel road” turbulence is fine, though I’d prefer smooth sailing myself. But “roller coaster” turbulence makes me freak out. How can you sleep when you’re basically in free fall for thousands of feet, then forcibly caught, violently shaken, and repeat over and over?

I’m not sure if your statement is meant literally or is exaggerating for effect, but the typical distances fallen by a plane, even in severe turbulence, aren’t thousands or even hundreds of feet (except in very rare cases when a plane flies through a severe downdraft or a microburst). Some tens is pretty much the maximum, though I appreciate that it feels like a lot more.

http://fearofflyingschool.com/airplane-turbulence

@From the transcript above

And even with the heavy turbulence, the VERTICAL movements of the aircraft are usually in – I don’t know – less than 10 feet or so.

Turbulence: Everything You Need to Know - AskThePilot.com

I remember one night, headed to Europe, hitting some unusually rough air about halfway across the Atlantic. It was the kind of turbulence people tell their friends about. It came out of nowhere and lasted several minutes, and was bad enough to knock over carts in the galleys. During the worst of it, to the sound of crashing plates, I recalled an email. A reader had asked me about the displacement of altitude during times like this. How many feet is the plane actually moving up or down, and side to side? I kept a close watch on the altimeter. Fewer than forty feet, either way, is what I saw. Ten or twenty feet, if that, most of the time.

(bolding mine)

[DrCube]

Thanks. I was discussing this very topic once with a pilot, how I didn’t mind slightly bumpy turbulence but hated the roller coaster type, and I mentioned “it felt like falling a thousand feet” and the pilot said “that certainly could have been what happened”. But now that I think of it, he was an Air Force pilot, so he probably had a very different experience than an airline pilot.