Although mid-air fatalities are rare—notwithstanding the recent death of a 73-year-old man on a Singapore Airlines flight—turbulence remains the leading cause of airline incidents resulting in injuries, experts say. And climate change is making it worse.
“Our latest future projections indicate a doubling or tripling of severe turbulence in the jet streams in the coming decades if the climate continues to change as we expect,” Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading, UK, told CBC News.
His research shows that in the North Atlantic, clear-air turbulence (CAT) has increased 55% since 1979. CAT occurs in the atmosphere away from any visible clouds, often in the vicinity of jet streams. It is not visible to the naked eye or detectable by conventional onboard aircraft radar, making it particularly hazardous for aviation.
It is still not known exactly what kind of turbulence the Singapore Airlines flight from London to Singapore was dealing with, reports BBC News, but based on the weather forecast it is likely to have been CAT, or disruption caused by thunderstorms.
In addition to the man’s death on the flight, likely caused by a heart attack, more than 100 people were injured, with 43 of them still in hospitals four days later. Among them, 22 people have spinal or spinal cord damage, six have skull or brain injuries, and another 13 have damaged bones or internal organs.
Dzafran Azmir, a 28-year-old student aboard the plane, described the event: “Suddenly the aircraft starts tilting up and there was shaking so I started bracing for what was happening, and very suddenly there was a very dramatic drop so everyone seated and not wearing a seatbelt was launched immediately into the ceiling.”
“Some people hit their heads on the baggage cabins overhead and dented it; they hit the places where lights and masks are and broke straight through it.”
Just five days later, a Qatar Airways flight also encountered turbulence that caused people to “hit the roof” of the plane, with 12 passengers and crew members sustaining injuries, reports the Guardian.
“Turbulence—a sudden, violent shift in air flow—is the most common cause of airline accidents involving injuries,” CBC writes. From 2009 through 2018, the United States transportation safety agency found it accounted for more than one-third of reported airline incidents, and most resulted in one or more serious injuries.
Flying into turbulence is similar to encountering a powerful wave in the ocean, and can be caused by several factors, including jet streams, updrafts from mountains, and storms. Pilots can plan flights around expected turbulence to some extent—by avoiding a jet stream or traveling around a storm—but the type of CAT that likely affected the Singapore Air flight can occur anywhere, at any time.
And it can “be difficult to avoid because it doesn’t show up on the weather radar in the flight deck,” Williams said.
“It is not that we’ll have to stop flying, or planes will start falling out of the sky,” he told Nature. “I’m just saying that for every 10 minutes you’ve spent in severe turbulence in the past, it could be 20 or 30 minutes in the future.”
Other research published in the journal Nature Climate Change shows climate change is distorting the jet stream, speeding up the powerful winds in the upper atmosphere, CBC writes.
“Based on these results and our current understanding, we expect record-breaking winds,” Tiffany Shaw, a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, said in a release last year.
“It’s likely that they will feed into decreased flight times, increased CAT, and a potential increase in severe weather occurrence.”
