I fly pretty frequently and its almost guaranteed that during every flight i'll hear the annoucement:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are about to enter a zone of turbulance and so for your safety the Captain has turned on the fasten seatbelt sign..."
then, almost immediately after the announcement, the plane starts to rattle and shake.
My question is this; turbulance is nothing more than angry air, and you can't see air, so how do they know we're about to hit turbulance?
Do pilots have a magical 'wind warning system' up there in the cockpit do they just make the announcement then jiggle the controls around to give us a bit of a bumpy ride?
Answers on a sick bag please.
x
3 comments:
Hi Kristen,
You are right that a lot of turbulence is hidden in clouds or is invisible "clear air" turbulence caused by thermal updrafts, the edges of the jetstream, or even vortices left in the wake of an aircraft (which is dangerous on takeoff and landing when plans are bunched close together).
But some turbulence is actually visible because pilots can see parts of distant cloud formations moving in strange ways.
Otherwise pilots also rely on reports of turbulence from other planes. The major flight routes are are pretty busy and knowing what the plane up ahead saw is valuable in knowing what you're in for.
So whenever pilots encounter turbulence or other nasty things like unexpectedly strong winds or icing of the fuselage then they send a radio report and this is then relayed to all other aircraft that are or will be passing through the same area.
I read also that in the US they are testing experimental turbulence simulation models.
But all of this is a very inexact science. So hold on to your coffee cup, or take the train.
I'm presuming we can thank Wikipedia for this Fergus, unless you're a secret areoplane anorak... :)
I strenuously deny all anorak tendencies. :)
But I do have a friend (he will remain nameless but you know him too) who is an ex-pilot and who sometimes bores his companions to tears with factoids on air travel. I guess I remembered more than I would have thought.
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