The latest injuries from airplane turbulence were on flights to Honolulu and Houston, leading to a total of 41 people being hurt or receiving medical treatment in just two days — Sunday and Monday.
Back in July, severe turbulence led to at least eight minor injuries on a flight to Nashville, Tennessee, which had to be diverted to Alabama. Another three serious injuries to crew members were reported on three separate flights this year to Detroit, Miami and Columbus, Ohio, according to data from the National Transportation Safety Board.
U.S. airlines have made steady improvements in their overall accident rate, but turbulence continues to be a major cause of accidents and injuries, according to a 2021 NTSB report. Turbulence accounted for 37.6% of all accidents on larger commercial airlines between 2009 and 2018.
The Federal Aviation Administration also stated in a release Monday that there were 146 serious injuries from turbulence from 2009 to 2021.
Climate change is expected to make turbulence worse in the coming decades, experts say. And while improvements in forecasting will help, not everyone expects the technology to ever be perfect.
In the meantime, the NSTB says that more can be done — both within the industry and among passengers. And everyone agrees that simply wearing a seatbelt during the entire flight will significantly reduce one’s risk of injury.
WHAT IS TURBULENCE?
Turbulence is essentially unstable air that moves in a non-predictable fashion. Most people associate it with heavy storms. But the most dangerous type is clear-air turbulence, which can be hard to predict and often with no visible warning in the sky ahead.
Clear-air turbulence happens most often in or near the high-altitude rivers of air called jet streams. The culprit is wind shear, which is when two huge air masses close to each other move at different speeds. If the difference in speed is big enough, the atmosphere can’t handle the strain, and it breaks into turbulent patterns like eddies in water.
“When those eddies are on the same scale as the aircraft, it causes one side of the aircraft to go up and one side to go down or causes the airplane to lose and gain altitude very quickly,” said Thomas Guinn, a meteorology professor at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
If pilots experience moderate turbulence, they can generally avoid it by flying to a higher altitude, Guinn said. But severe…
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