I remember one night, headed to Europe, hitting some unusually rough air about halfway across the Atlantic. Passengers might feel the plane “plummeting” or “diving” - words the media can’t get enough of - when in fact it’s hardly moving. Over the whole history of modern commercial aviation, the number of jetliner crashes caused by turbulence, even indirectly, can be counted on one hand.Īltitude, bank, and pitch will change only slightly during turbulence - in the cockpit we see just a twitch on the altimeter - and inherent in the design of airliners is a trait known to pilots as “positive stability.” Should the aircraft be shoved from its position in space, its nature is to return there, on its own. They can withstand an extreme amount of stress, and the level of turbulence required to dislodge an engine or cause structural damage is something even the most frequent flyer - or pilot for that matter - won’t experience in a lifetime of traveling. Planes themselves are engineered to take a remarkable amount of punishment, and they have to meet stress limits for both positive and negative G-loads. The pilots aren’t worried about the wings falling off they’re trying to keep their customers relaxed and everybody’s coffee where it belongs. When a flight changes altitude in search of smoother conditions, this is by and large in the interest of comfort. From a pilot’s perspective it is ordinarily seen as a convenience issue, not a safety issue. Turbulence is an aggravating nuisance for everybody, including the crew, but it’s also, for lack of a better term, normal. Conditions might be annoying and uncomfortable, but the plane is not going to crash. For all intents and purposes, a plane cannot be flipped upside-down, thrown into a tailspin, or otherwise flung from the sky by even the mightiest gust or air pocket.
So much about it seems dangerous.Įxcept that, in all but the rarest circumstances, it’s not. Boats are occasionally swamped, capsized, or dashed into reefs by swells, so the same must hold true for airplanes. It’s easy to picture the airplane as a helpless dinghy in a stormy sea. Everybody who steps on a plane is uneasy on some level, and there’s no more poignant reminder of flying’s innate precariousness than a good walloping at 37,000 feet. But is it a crasher of planes? Judging by the reactions of many airline passengers, one would assume so turbulence is far and away the number one concern of anxious flyers. Turbulence: spiller of coffee, jostler of luggage, filler of barf bags, rattler of nerves.
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