Didn’t take them long. They found some QLD uni guy (of course) to say we should get use to this with climate change. This is like dialling a friend for an answer you want to hear. Another guy who was qualified, said that we must ‘consider the likely increase in turbulence’. That’s not saying it was caused by climate change like the ABC is suggesting.
The problem is that they neglected to mention a few things again. This is present somewhere at any given time across the world. This is caused by the jet stream. It’s like Rouge waves. These things are there but given the shear size of the planet, you are unlucky to run into one. Radars and weather prediction satellites can help. The jets have radar in front of the pilot, but clear air turbulence is almost impossible to detect. It is rare, but it’s not new. That won’t stop the fear mongering ABC from having a swing for the fence.How about the obvious fact that many more planes are in the air these days? I wonder if that would increase the likelihood of an event?
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 you get strong wind shear near the jet stream, it can cause the air to overflow. And that creates these chaotic motions in the air,” Thomas Guinn, chair of applied aviation sciences department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, explained.
HOW COMMON ARE TURBULENCE-RELATED INJURIES?
Tracking the total number of turbulence-related injuries around the world is difficult. But some individual countries publish national data.
More than one-third of all airline incidents in the United States from 2009 through 2018 were related to turbulence, and most of them resulted in one or more serious injuries but no damage to the plane, the National Transportation Safety Board reported.
Between 2009 and 2022, 163 people were injured seriously enough during turbulence events to require hospital treatment for at least two days, according to NTSB figures. Most of them were flight attendants, who are particularly at risk since they are more likely to be out of their seats during a flight.
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