Feb. 24, an afternoon flight. I’m travelling from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York’s LaGuardia airport after a vacation with my kids and a friend. In the last few years, I’ve become sufficiently weird about flying to check in advance for high wind, and today, unfortunately, it’s windy. After takeoff, the captain informs us that once we get below 10,000 feet (3048 meters), he’ll be advising the stewards to stay seated. He uses the words a “few bumps,” which I tell myself sounds almost charming — Whoops-a-daisy! Just a few bumps! — and “moderate turbulence,” which is less reassuring. In airline parlance, “moderate,” I’m aware, means extremely unfun if you happen to be frightened of flying.
About 45 minutes before we’re scheduled to land, an attendant comes over the address system.
“In light of the severe turbulence we’re expecting,” he says, “we need everyone to make sure their seatbelts are securely fastened and bags are fully underneath the seats in front. If you need to use the bathroom, go now.”
Photo: AP
There is a short pause.
“This is going to be rough, folks.”
I twist in my seat to look back at my friend. Jesus Christ, it’s actually happening. We’re all going to die.
Photo: AFP
For those of you who aren’t afraid of flying, let me walk you through what happens next: panic, sweat, shortness of breath. A thudding in the chest and the ears. It feels as if some essential part of me that is usually appropriately anchored lets slip its moorings and starts sliding around my insides like mercury. I scan the flight attendants for signs of unease. I glance at my children, who are playing Battleship on the seat-back screen and tell them to put on their sweatshirts (to protect them from fire after we crash). Briefly, I consider the sex toys in the drawer of my office at home that someone — God, who? — will have to dispose of after my death, and am fleetingly distracted by the observation that fear of embarrassment is more powerful than fear of death.
I look at the people around me: a young woman in a grey hoodie hunched over her phone; a guy watching CNBC. Across the aisle, a smartly dressed woman is inputting data into her laptop in defiance of the return-your-tray-tables-to-upright advisory, so that when it flies up and imbeds itself in her skull, she’ll be killed by her own spreadsheet.
So, I think, these are the people I’ll die with.
Finally, my mind snags on the thought I have every single time this happens to me on a flight, which, at the moment, seems to be every time I fly: I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe that after all this life, all this effort, all this striving to make things work and get my taxes in on time, and find the right school, and come up with ideas and execute them, and read 10,000-word pieces about the implications of market saturation on TV streaming services, and save for college, and save for retirement, and build a life and sustain it, that this – Whoa, first big bump, there are a couple of yelps and one plucky, “Woo!” — is how it’s going to end: with the bad Game of Thrones reboot in my peripheral vision as we make our initial descent over Delaware.
TURBULENCE
Turbulence is getting worse. This is both the official story and one supported by anecdote. In March, a Lufthansa flight en route from Texas to Germany diverted to Dulles airport in Washington DC after turbulence injured seven people. Last December, a Hawaiian Airlines flight from Phoenix to Honolulu encountered turbulence so bad that 20 people required hospitalization. In July, another Hawaiian Airlines flight, from Honolulu to Sydney, hit turbulence that injured seven people. In August, 11 people were hospitalized when a Delta flight encountered turbulence on its descent into Atlanta. The injuries included lacerations, head trauma, broken bones and loss of consciousness, mainly among passengers not wearing their seatbelts.
Turbulence can be notoriously hard to predict, and data on injury numbers is unreliably thin; the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) depends on airlines to report instances of “serious injury” and puts the average at 58 a year. Given that US airlines alone carried 853 million passengers last year, it’s a negligible number. And yet, over the last year, the headlines have been alarmist.
Based on the coverage, you would be forgiven for thinking that, 30 years from now, we’ll be back to crossing the Atlantic by ocean liner.
Why can’t we just fly around it? Are pilots ever afraid? What are cabin crew thinking during a rough flight? And, obviously, what are the chances that this flight I’m on is going to crash?
TURBULENCE AND CLIMATE CHANGE
A good place to start is in late 2012 with a knock on the door at the University of Reading in Berkshire. Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science, was in his office when a colleague came in with a question: “What does climate change do to turbulence?” As a young academic, Williams had specialized in atmospheric physics hoping to “make the world a better place.” This question of his colleague’s struck him not only as interesting and important, but one that had never been asked before. He assembled a team and they set about studying a single airline route — London to New York.
It’s hard to miss the irony: that one cost of the carbon footprint caused by flying is likely to be more unpleasant flights
Flight attendants trained to calm frightened flyers will tell you that turbulence is akin to a “pothole in the road,” an analogy that has never really worked for me (what if the pothole becomes a sinkhole?). Although the term “turbulence” covers a multitude of things, there are, broadly, two types: convective turbulence, also know as “thermals,” which tends to occur closer to the ground and is a result of warm air rising in unstable patterns. And clear air turbulence, the focus of Williams’s study, which happens much higher in the atmosphere and is the kind that may cause a plane to drop so abruptly it makes the 10 o’clock news.
Matt Fronzak, the former head of meteorology at Delta Air Lines and a principal aviation systems engineer at the Mitre Corporation, likens turbulence to “stirring milk in your coffee” and watching the two liquids clash and diffuse. “Imagine you’ve got a 1,000 feet by 1,000 feet block of air,” says Fronzak. “On one side of this cube, the wind is blowing from the south at 20 knots, and, on the other, the wind is blowing out of the east at 40 knots. What happens when the wind from the east meets the wind from the west? They roil. They produce eddies or waves. That’s what we feel on the aircraft when we say, ‘Oh, it’s turbulent.’”
Clear air turbulence can’t be picked up by satellite. In fact, says Williams, “it comes out of the blue. You can be one second away from it and you won’t know it’s there.”
Ten years ago, when he and his team first looked at satellite data relating to wind shear — those “eddies” capable of roiling the plane — they discovered something previously unknown: that as climate change raised temperatures, so wind shear and instances of turbulence rose, too. At the time, says Williams, this was a hypothesis based on computer simulations, and “we didn’t really understand why.” Now, after expanding the study to analyze 40 years’ worth of satellite measurements covering a range of global flight paths, they have a much clearer picture, and it’s startling: since the 1970s, wind shear in the jet stream has increased by a whopping 15 percent.
“We have a complete link,” says Williams. “We know that CO2 changes the temperatures, which changes the winds, which makes the jet stream more sheared. This isn’t computer modelling. It has already happened.”
It’s hard to miss the karmic irony: that one of the many costs of the massive carbon footprint caused by flying is likely to be much more unpleasant flights.
What this means in real terms is extremely hard to discern. On paper, it remains the case that, as people love to point out when you tell them you are frightened of flying, taking a plane is the safest form of travel
According to FlightAware, a Web site that tracks the progress of aircraft in US airspace at one to two-minute intervals, a Lufthansa that diverted to Washington Dulles after violent turbulence injured seven people had descended roughly 10,000ft over 10 minutes.
“So the plane lost [altitude] over a certain span of time,” says Patrick Smith, a pilot for a major US airline who runs the popular website, Askthepilot.com. “Maybe the crew was intentionally changing altitude to get out of the turbulence, which you extrapolate as a dive caused by the turbulence. They’re two different things.”
If you have your seatbelt on throughout the flight, he says, you really have nothing to worry about.
BAD WEATHER
There is something I’ve never understood: if the mantra “Turbulence doesn’t cause crashes” is true, why do airlines cancel because of bad weather? Huh? If the plane literally can’t be brought down by rough air, then why not fly through it? Airlines, not famous for putting the comfort of passengers first, surely aren’t wasting money because nobody likes bumps?
As head of Delta’s weather department and later, as a dispatcher and manager at Delta Flight Control in Atlanta, Georgia, there was one weather condition that, when Fronzak got into work in the morning, made his heart sink. All sorts of things can disrupt air travel, and half of them have to do with logistics, not weather. Unexpected snowfall in Tennessee, where there aren’t enough snowploughs, might mean disruption to flights taking off in New York. Ice can be particularly tricky, says Fronzak.
But the most troublesome weather condition in aviation is arguably thunderstorms, a term that, says Fronzak, acts as a “proxy for a variety of hazards including hail, lightning, extreme rain, wind shear and the resultant turbulence — all of which can be impactful to aviation, and some of which could be arguably fatal.” For airline meteorologists, the difficulty with thunderstorms is that they “are extraordinarily transient and difficult to forecast. We understand when the conditions are most favorable to them, but to actually say, at this point in our ability to forecast, there will be a thunderstorm here at this time, is impossible.”
In the cockpit, meanwhile, pilots, like zen masters, learn that during rough air often the best thing to do is nothing at all.
“The airplane, by its nature, wants to return back to the point in space that it was in before being disrupted by turbulence,” says Smith.
He is so urbane and reassuring, he reminds me of a British Airways pilot who, after the roughest descent I’ve ever experienced, popped up over the address system to apologize cheerfully for what he called “a bit of a sporty landing.”
During turbulence, says Smith, it’s better to be “very hands off. There’s no point in fighting every little jolt. You’re just making things worse. I mean there are cases in really bad turbulence where you might be upset to the point where you have to manually recover, but that’s extremely unusual.”
To talk of “fear” in this context misunderstands the nature of piloting. “An airline cockpit is a dynamic place, there’s a lot going on. Things — usually minor things — go wrong routinely and, sure, your pulse might jump for a second. That doesn’t mean that you’re about to crash. It just means you have to deal with something, and that’s what you’re trained to do. It’s the same in any profession. People’s pulses jump all the time when they’re dealing with certain situations; that doesn’t make the situations dangerous.”
The fact is, however, that very occasionally weather does bring down a plane. Factoring out pilot error, the circumstances in which it can happen are extremely limited.
“Turbulence can’t bring an aircraft down,” says Fronzak.
Even if, as research by Williams — the professor of atmospheric science — suggests, turbulence trebles by the 2050s, “if you take a tenth of a per cent and treble it, it’s still only a few tenths of a per cent.”
There is nothing in his research to suggest, he says, that “certain parts of airspace will become unnavigable because of climate change.”
After three years of not flying, my cousin Jim Hemphill found a therapeutic program that worked for him. Now, he says, when turbulence starts shaking the plane, he goes through the drill.
“I deliberately relax my legs, and take my shoes off. I stretch out. I think of relaxing my body.”
There is still an instinct to seize up when the plane shudders. But by governing his own responses, he is able to circumvent the worst of the panic and regain a sense of control.
“If you clench your entire body, the feedback loop with your mind is: ‘We are in terrible danger here.’ By choosing to relax, with the faith that doing so will cause the panic to diminish and disappear — my observation is that it does work.”
Not long after he returned to flying, he and his family were due to go on holiday to Italy, and his wife asked what he was most looking forward to. To her amazement, he replied: “Putting the seat down and closing my eyes on the flight.”
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