Turbulence

Turbulence can be nerve-wracking, but commercial pilots usually know where the worst is and can avoid it. I've been through some pretty rough stuff and the aircraft have always come through just fine.

I have always understood that seats near the center of gravity, i.e. over the wing, tend to give a slightly smoother ride than those at the fuselage's extremities.

 

It is just an annoyance. One of the prime considerations in designing an airplane is turbulence and the wings and fuselage are designed to cope with it. Relax and take a nap. Pilots know that they must avoid or accommodate turbulence and no modern airliner has been chopped up by rough air. Relax and sit near the center of the airplane if you can. The tail end will throw you around a bit more than a seat over the wing center section. Anyway, relax!

 

Just for some perspective..... I'm one of the only people in my current unit who hasn't flown through a Hurricane but there are a few guys who have flown through straight through, including the eye wall, several hundred times over their careers. Over the past 50 years a variety of airframes have been used and in most cases they are, apart from extra instrumentation, bone stock. Bad stuff can happen, you don't want to lose an engine in the middle of a hurricane hundreds of miles from land for instance. It doesn't get bigger than a hurricane and it's not as if the wings are falling off the aircraft. From what I understand back during the Cold War the Air Force did some really crazy stuff flying KC-135s and others through hurricanes to test air refueling under those conditions.

The biggest threat during severe turbulence, in my mind, is unsecured crap flying around inside the aircraft. Whether this is human bodies not safety belted or stuff like cans of Coke you can get hurt by that stuff. That's what you see in most of the pics is people's stuff sprayed around the cabin in a giant mess. Apart from that the plane is fine.

 

I just watched an episode this week on Hurricane Hugo where an Orion lost an engine and needed 2nd aircraft to assist *while circling within the eye* of that beast.. hairy stuff.

https://noaahrd.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/25th-anniversary-of-a-hairy-hop-into-hurricane-hugo/

I wonder if lots of hefty metal and a good design is best basis for being such a "tough" plane vs newer composites if they could do that and more and just a matter of time before they phase in as older craft retire..

 

Lockheed Martin has developed a technology called WindTracer that can locate otherwise-unseen clear-air turbulence. Turbulence in or near clouds is expected but the clear-air stuff can surprise you, so this is a step forward.

WindTracer® for Airports · Lockheed Martin

 

It kind of depends what sort of turbulence you are talking about. Clear air turbulence, even though uncomfortable, will never be an issue.

Thunderstorm-related turbulence is a different matter... that can damage an airplane, or even cause an accident. However, the dangers of thunderstorms have become quite well known over the last 60-70 years, and thunderstorm avoidance technology has gotten better, so as a passenger I wouldn't be too concerned.

As a pilot, I always treat thunderstorms with great respect, and do my best to avoid them.

 

Not usually too scared of turbulence but also don't enjoy it.

Had an experience last summer which helped a lot. I was riding the leg from Phoenix to Santa Anna late one afternoon and the pilot acknowledged heavy turbulence all the way in prior to our take off from Phoenix which upset quite a few of the passengers. No service, nothing for the whole flight.

Well, we took off and it was rough. Sitting next to me was a young man who took out a large lap top from his under seat carry on who was flying home for the weekend. He usually lives in Phoenix where he is going to flight school. He fired up the lap top and brought up what appeared to be the radar for the local area, including Santa Anna. It displayed all of the planes and what was going which I found very interesting and relieving. Not that knowing all of this stuff helps your fears or stomach when a plane falls what appears to be 10 - 20 feet every 15 seconds but it did show that keeping one's mind busy helps.

I was very impressed with the knowledge of the young flight student.

 

It's uncomfortable and annoying. If you're buckled in your seat you'll be fine. For more comfort, I would avoid sitting anywhere behind the wing simply due to increased noise and increased yaw movement (side to side).

 

I've been taught, keep clear by at least 20 miles, to be safe.
Gary Bobileff

 

There is a reason why 1st class is in the front of the airplane. However, as Jim and Bob stated, the minimum g loading due to gust will be at the cg of the airplane (somewhere over the wing center box).

 

Not to be alarming, but in at least one case, clear-air turbulence did destroy a jetliner.

It was a BOAC 707 that encountered a mountain wave, essentially an invisible horizontal tornado, in the lee of Mount Fuji in Japan in 1965. But this kind of wave is a known factor and can be avoided. In this case the pilot deviated from the normal airway to give his passengers a better view, and it cost 113 people their lives. The controller could have warned the pilot of a possibility of extreme turbulence.

I wouldn't worry about that. As I said, that was an extreme situation that occurred 50 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911

P.S. According to the article, the producers of the James Bond movies were supposed to have been on that flight. If they had, the series of movies might have been much shorter!

 

Good point, Jim. I guess that I was discussing CAT and automatically discounted thunder storms and mountain turbulence. On a trip to Merced in the L-3 we had a strong tailwind and I got too low to the top of Syskiou summit (5600 ft) and got a frightening ride down the lee side and somehow got away with it. I assumed that it was common knowledge to stay out of thunder storms in any kind of equipment. We had a complacent business man who flew under a very bad system in Florida in an Ercoup and they found him and parts of his airplane scattered around a wide area.

 

On long flights I choose seats over the wings. The plane will move less around the Center of Gravity which is where the wings are (yes I know some here are saying DUH!) right now.

If you are in the last row of a plane, the plane moves up and down farther so you feel it more.

I worked for Boeing in my first job out of college. I saw the rigs they used to test the deflection of the wings of the 747. There is no way in the world that a turbulence could make the wings deflect that much before failure.

I would say the worst is a situation where the pilot is decelerating or turning hard when it happens. After 3 million miles of flying, it still bothers me. I guess human nature is something you can never out think.

 

Like we said, take a nap. The air is always rough over the Rockies.

 

Airplanes are designed to not fail (for 3 seconds) at 1.5 times the max operational load. OHSA ensures that everyday ladders are designed for 5 times the max operational load. Ladders still fail. The difference is that the probability of ever seeing the max operational load on a commercial airliner is low.

 

I've found knowing where the plane is and the path it's taking to be very comforting. Seeing that you're in a line of planes when taking off/landing that all turn at the same spots eliminates that isolated feeling when nerves start creeping in

Flightradar24 is a great resource

 

Wildest I ever experienced was in Peru, in an older 737 equipped for short runways, flying into small towns and some cities (Inquitos) isolated in the rain forest. the plane was really moving around and at one point I looked down the aisle and you could see the whole plane was corkscrewing through the air-I was fascinated for a bit but then watching it started to make me queasy.

I presumed the aircrew was used to this sort of thing and looked out the window instead as we flew along. Below was primary jungle/rain forest with huge trees growing out of the flooded jungle below. I decided that if we did go down I would prefer not to survive as I imagined surviving and having to climb up a tree and try to hang on until I dropped from exhaustion and was devoured by alligators and other beasts inhabiting the primordial soup : )

 

The roughest flight I can remember was a springtime flight on a United 767 from Denver to La Guardia. As we were approaching New Jersey, the pilot asked the cabin crew to put everything away and be seated, often a sign of significant turbulence ahead.

Evidently, in order to reach NYC, we had to descend through a long squall line that was too long to deviate around and had cloud tops too high to go over at that point in the flight. I presume the pilot used his weather radar to find the least turbulent path, but for about 8 minutes we were doing the bump & grind. The view out the window was just the inside of a grey cloud, and we were on spoilers the whole time. When we hit a big bump (and there were many) you could hear a collective "ohh!" from a fair number of passengers. I was over the wing so it might have been rougher elsewhere in the cabin. At that point I was glad that I was riding in an aircraft that I helped design!

The remarkable thing was that I was sitting next to a 15-year-old high-school wrestler who seemed totally cool and unperturbed, perhaps the only passenger that I could say that about. When we touched down at LGA, applause broke out in the cabin, and in my mind I echoed Joe Patroni's immortal words (from the movie Airport), "nice going, sweetheart!"

 

My worst was Miami to Denver years ago. 727. Continental, I think.
Summer. Night flight, supposed to arrive about 9 PM.

There were tornados across the South and in Texas.
We 'detoured' so far south out into the Gulf that we had to land in El Paso to take on more fuel.
It was still very, very, very rough.
No food, beverages, etc. cabin crew was buckled in most of the way.

We were at the rear edge of the wing root. So rough that I could not hold my paperback still enough to read. Most just sat with eyes shut.
Kept seeing this red light vertically traversing the windows on the opposite side... was the wingtip. Major flexing.
Woman behind us was screaming.

Finally arrived in Denver about midnight.

 

Except usually when there are reports of injuries (passengers or crew) it is due to instances of clear air turbulence.

 

Good stuff to watch people in the airport but I like the flying end of it more. When I was a little kid and my dad was flying in Ford Tri-Motors he often spoke of hitting "air pockets" so it's been around since men got into the air.