A jet airplane is traveling along at its normal fast clip, eating up the miles. Suddenly, it shudders, shies, sideslips, and skitters, its soundtrack a cacophony of clattering tableware, falling laptops, and gasping, even crying, passengers and crew.
Thus a particularly bad patch of turbulence, something every seasoned air traveler has encountered at some point or another, and for which we all have our war stories. Mine took place somewhere over North Carolina in the late fall of 1985, when a plane I was taking from New York to Atlanta hit a slippery bit of sky and slid, as if over a churning waterfall, sideways for what must have been hundreds of if not a few thousand feet, a seeming free fall that lasted for long, agonizing seconds until evening out.
A study of flowing water in ink over chalk, c. 1510-3, by Leonardo da Vinci. Credit: The Print Collector/Heritage-Images
Turbulence is the inevitable outcome of the medium of the air following the laws of physics—more precisely, those of fluid dynamics. We think of air as being, well, air. But air seems to think of itself as an especially thin form of water, for its flows are just about the same as those of liquid. Consider how a slow-moving stream flows, placidly and without surface disturbance. When that water encounters obstacles such as a snagged tree or an underwater boulder, it ripples; the air analog would be the thermals that rise up from mountain ranges. Water flowing at differential speed from tributaries and feeder streams will disturb the main branch of the stream as well.
The turbulence that affects air is more violent than that in water, however, because air has less density and lower viscosity; if air were soupier, like, say, motor oil, then an object passing through it would do so without much incident. But air is not oil, and not even water, and so the turbulence that affects it can be strong—surprisingly so.
Pilots know where to be on the lookout for the kind of turbulence that is formed by natural features of the ground and by weather systems. The interface of mountains and plains is often a place where turbulent air abounds, for winds that rush along at ground level meet those mountains and then shoot up into the sky.
Turbulence is also common where the jet stream blows strong from west to east, especially in late fall and winter, when storms march in from the Pacific across North America; every traveler with miles under his or her belt knows the helpless feeling of being bounced along over the Great Plains against a headwind that bucks like a bronco from out of the Gulf of Alaska. The frontal boundaries of storm systems often carry dangerous cross-currents of air, akin to dangerous rip tides in the ocean, that can be bumpy—or, even worse, deadly, producing so-called wind shear that can push a plane straight into the ground at takeoff or landing. Every seasoned pilot has encountered plenty of examples of both, and meteorologists and climate modelers have developed sophisticated tools over the years to help detect such potentially problematic winds.
The odd pockets of fast-moving air that roil above and below the jet stream are another matter entirely. This so-called clear air turbulence is dangerous precisely because it cannot be reliably forecast, even as a matter of probability. Clear air turbulence is a gravity wave, very much like an ocean wave, associated with jet streams at high altitudes—and, uncomfortably, just at the altitudes at which airline pilots like to set their cruising levels. Most of the time those waves roll along without much incident apart from rattling our trays and causing the more timid to grab at their armrests, but sometimes they can reach tsunami levels and cause real problems.
Credit: Encylcopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Indeed, a matter of what one fluid-dynamics textbook calls “nonlinearities and statistical imponderables,” clear-air strikes from out of nowhere, it seems, and no one is immune. In June 1996, for instance, Air Force One, carrying President Bill Clinton, was badly shaken by a vortex of clear air turbulence over the Texas panhandle. One person aboard was injured.
If Air Force One cannot get around rough air, considering the value of its cargo, then the rest of us don’t stand a chance. And, in fact, clear air turbulence simply cannot be avoided, even though pilots keep a sharp eye out for reports of it filed by other pilots who have preceded them over a particular stretch of ground and try to fly above, below, or around areas where that turbulence has been encountered.
Air turbulence of all varieties has hurt many people over the years in North America alone. In May 2008, for instance, an Air Canada flight bound from Vancouver to Shanghai, China, hit a particularly strong downdraft over the Rockies. Fourteen passengers were hurt, some badly, forcing the plane to put down in Calgary to get them to hospital. In August 2009, a Continental flight bound from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Houston, Texas, hit a fast-moving body of air over the Atlantic, forcing the hospitalization of seven passengers. From 1980 to 2008, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, there were 234 turbulence-related events over the United States, resulting in serious injury to 114 passengers. On rare occasions, turbulence has even resulted in deaths—but only three in that period.
Almost all the injuries and two of those three deaths befell passengers who were not wearing seat belts at the time of the accident. Just so, 184 flight attendants were injured in those incidents, none of them wearing seat belts. As in a car crash, a patch of air turbulence can send a vehicle or the passengers within it into centrifugal motion. In the case of ordinary air turbulence, the light car-wheels-on-a-washboard-road sensation that air travelers feel on many flights, this is nothing more than an inconvenience producing, at most, a little discomfort except for among the most white-knuckled of fliers. In the case of more severe turbulence, however, this centrifugal force can be strong enough to hurl an unbuckled passenger straight to the ceiling. Even pilots have been injured, banging their heads on the low roofs of their cockpits.
The statistics provide good reason for your captain to insist that you keep your seat belt on and stay seated unless answering a call of nature. So cinch those belts tight, fellow fliers, and hang on.