Fortunately for the OP, only one of those cases involved the scenario he/most of us might have a hard time keeping out of our imaginations – turbulence so severe that the plane falls apart, something crucial breaks off, it tumbles out of control, or is smashed into the ground (and that looks like it was a small commuter plane, not that that’s reassuring as I fly those too). But most turbulence related injuries/deaths are (unlike many other hazards of flying) largely within your control, as it generally (not always) involves someone not wearing their seatbelt. Wear your seatbelt – you’re 35,000 feet up traveling 575 mph, a little caution might not be misplaced (I always tell myself).
[of course there’s the grimly amusing footnote to the effect that “Excluded are accidents involving jet airliners designed or built in the former Soviet Union,” 'cause your page of aircraft fatalities would get a lot more cluttered if you didn’t exclude those]
I think the more intelligent one is, the harder it can be to control your fear because your imagination starts running wild. This quote by George Patton sums it up:
*“If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.” *
I flew to DFW about two weeks after 9/11 and as you may or may not know DFW airport is located between Dallas and Fort Worth which affords passengers terrific views of both skylines, something you don’t always get as you can’t see directly ahead. All of a sudden, for no reason whatsoever, I start wondering about who’s flying the plane. Are we going to fly into Bank of America Plaza? How do I know the flight deck hadn’t been commandeered without anyone knowing? I had the strongest impulse to do something, anything, like run up to the flight deck which would have been extremely stupid. :smack: My sister suffers from panic attacks so I guess I got a little taste of what she goes through at times
Trying to do a properly nested double-multiquote was too hard. So look for lines of … where the folks I quote were quoting somebody else.
Airliner PA’s are push-to-talk, not voice activated. Why the ah’s? Poor technique & zero actual, you know, training. None of us ever get a good opportunity to hear what we really sound like.
Actually, there is a significant mental shift required to make a good PA. While we’re flying we’re mentally operating at several hundred miles per hour. Conversations in the cockpit & over the radio are full of jargon and delivered at radio announcer speed. The right way to PA is to formulate your complete speech in layman’s terms, pause, breath deep 2 or 3 times to slow your mind & voice down, then key the mike, pause, and begin speaking what feels like slowly and deliberately, like asking a 4 year old if she prefers a cookie or a chocolate. Done that way, it sounds about natural.
The other cardinal rule to remember is to never say “fuck” on the PA. The other pilot will often remind you of this rule a millisecond before you key the mike. That’s very helpful. And here you thought it was all business up there.
No. The forces involved are far less than will hurt the airplane.
Ensuring that one pilot is fully belted in and fully in control every second of every flight is treated as deadly serious business. Precisely to avoid the possibility of both of us being tossed about at once. I could concoct a scenario where on a long-haul flight the additional pilots were doing a shift change just as they hit something totally unexpected and somebody who wasn’t belted in landed on the controls and/or the other pilots, injuring all of them.
But as between worrying about that and worrying about being hit by a meteor … I think I’d be more worried about the meteors. Hundreds (thousands?) of them hit the Earth every day.
See?? There’s always something else to worry about.
As to ATC …
Yes, efforts are being made to stuff more airplanes into less sky both over land & in oceanic airspace. But they can’t move to tighter spacing until 100% of the participating airplanes & government agencies have the new gear, and only after everybody agrees on the new procedures. It’s a multi-decade on-going effort. Some incremental progress is made every few years.
As an example …
Back in the mid 90s we switched from 2000 foot vertical spacing enroute to 1000 foot vertical spacing. In effect this doubled the capacity of the airspace where it took effect. It was started over the North Atlantic but it took 20 years to get from idea to implementation there. It took another 10 years after that to get it in the continental US. I’m not 100% certain but I think there are still places on Earth which don’t have it. And there are still many aircraft, notably military types, which lack the redundant precision altimeters required to participate. So they have to go low or go around the close-spacing-allowed airspace. Which can double their trip time or fuel burn. Tough.
You’re dealing with a very highly engineered and very safe system. Nobody changes anything until we can prove to 99.999999% certainty that the change makes things safer, not less safe.
As to CAT … By “clear air” they really mean “not associated with convective weather = thunderstorms”. Turbulence in stratiform clouds is CAT.
Most turbulence at enroute altitudes is associated with the edge of the jetstream or a sharp frontal boundary. Neither of which phenomena care whether they’re over land or water. Jetstreams are mid-to-high latitude problems, whereas frontal boundaries can be found pretty much anywhere on Earth. Driving through either is a good place to expect to get jostled a bit.
In the US & Canada there *is *a significant source of orographic or mountain wave turbulence: the Rocky Mountains. Which just adds to the total turbulence supply over the western plains states / provinces.
Impressive, isn’t it? My Google-fu is weak, but I seem to recall wing tests of other Boeing airplanes that bent even further than that. The wing motion you see while in the air is really small potatoes compared to what they’re built to handle. It’s one of those things where it’s designed to flex because it’s stronger that way than if it’s completely rigid.
Planes are most likely to crash during takeoff and landing because they’re the complicated parts of flying, but also because those are the only times when the plane is close enough to the ground to hit it. Barring really severe storms, the worst turbulence can do is bounce a plane around. Even if the plane goes into a ‘falling out of the sky’ scenario (which requires more problems than just turbulence) there’s just nothing nearby to hit. The pilots will have plenty of time to pull out of it. (China Airlines Flight 006, which you may not want to read about if you’re already afraid of flying, went from nose-down freefall to level flight in 1,400 feet. They weren’t even at cruising altitude at that point, and they still had another 9,000 feet of airspace before they would have been in trouble.)
Planes are designed to survive severe turbulence, loss of electrical power, loss of an engine or two, lightning strikes, decompression, wheels-up landings, water landings, and a whole host of other things that scare the crap out of passengers. The pilots and crews rehearse for it. For every crash there are hundreds of events where the safety plans work and everyone comes through okay. If it helps your confidence, the people I know who work in the aerospace industry are the ones who are the MOST comfortable flying. Your gut may think otherwise, but airplanes really are far safer than cars.
Back in the mid 90s we switched from 2000 foot vertical spacing enroute to 1000 foot vertical spacing. In effect this doubled the capacity of the airspace where it took effect. It was started over the North Atlantic but it took 20 years to get from idea to implementation there. It took another 10 years after that to get it in the continental US. I’m not 100% certain but I think there are still places on Earth which don’t have it.
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Russia implemented RVSM on November 17, 2011, which I think closes all of the gaps worldwide.
As to the OP, the real reason I try to avoid turbulence is because the passengers don’t like it. If we’re flying an empty leg and we have better tailwinds or fuel burn at an altitude that’s got some bumps, I’d just as soon sit in the turbulence to operate airplane a little more efficiently. That being said, if it’s getting hard to push the buttons or switch the switches, it’s time to find a smoother altitude.
There’s a video of a 777 test here. When the wing finally does snap, I find it impressive just how much energy is stored in there–it goes off like it was packed with dynamite. There’s just no way to come anywhere close to that under any real-world load.
So what you’re saying is that an airplane could basically flap its wings like a bird and not fall apart?
Actually the degree of bend in that video looked less severe than in the photo linked earlier in the thread, but it’s probably the angle or something. It was still a lot of flex. And you’re right about the amount of energy released–it was impressive!
I believe the test is based on load, not deflection. A stiffer wing would deflect less for the same load. The 787 has a composite wing while the 777 is standard aluminum, so there may be differences there. Or, it could just be the angle…
Thanks. Equal parts encouraging and terrifying. Can’t even imagine what that must feel like to the passengers. Like I said, I’m not scared of dying, but the minutes of terror that would lead up to it. It can’t feel good.
I am fairly sure that the composite wing in 787 (in the linked photo) exhibits more wing flex than the metal wing in the 777 (in the linked video). You can see this in the photos below - the first link is a 787, while the second is a 777.
Since FlyByNight512 brought up Air China 006, I think it’s worth mentioning that the incident airplane, a 747SP, sustained a wing load of approximately 5.1 G’s during recovery from the upset attitude. That kind of force is pretty much unthinkable in an airliner. Five G’s is twice the design limit for the airplane, and something you might expect to encounter on a ride with the Blue Angels. The wings held about a thousand tons of load without failing. If that doesn’t instill confidence in the engineering, nothing will. That particular airplane may be a bit exceptional due to its design history, but suffice it to say that if you are not literally pinned to the ceiling or the floor due to inflight forces, any airliner will happily bounce through just about anything you can throw at it, and come out the other side none the worse for wear.
That doesn’t appear to always be the case. The transcript of Air France Flight 447 appears to me to indicate crew panic due to thunderstorm conditions, presumably including turbulence.
If it helps, the linked example was a former military aircraft with something near three YEARS of actual in-the-air flight time, under heavy load, and not being inspected enough (the structural failure was physically visible). Passenger airliners, I am led to believe, are under a lot more maintenance scrutiny.
And here you thought it was all business up there.