Short Stuff: Turbulence

or severe. But there's three types of turbulence. There's light turbulence, you know, it's kind of kind of shakes like your drink a little bit. And I'm going on this again. There's moderate, which is like your drink is now spilling out of your cup. And then there's severe and that is like the kind where people get hurt sometimes very

rarely die. But um I saw photos of a plane ride from Santa Anna up to Seattle, I think, and it was like a Delta flight and the drink cart was on its side and like they have been serving drinks and the thing the plane just hit turbulence, took a two ft nose dive, and apparently one of the flight attendants and the drink cart were on the ceiling and it just came down. So it can get pretty bad,

but it's very very rare, it turns out. Yeah, So if you haven't picked up on it, we're talking about airplane turbulence and specifically when a pilot knows when they come on there and say, you know, hold onto your butts everyone, here we go in the next ten minutes. I've always wondered, like, what the deal was, Well, now we know. Now we know when we can just bother every passenger next to us till the end of let me you know how they realize, you know, when they

make this announcement. Yeah, if you really want to get at somebody sleeping next to you on an airplane's attention, don't just kind of elbow them, like just slowly increase the pressure of your pointy elbow in the rib cage until they wake up. That'll get them talking. Yeah, And regardless, like you said, of how bad it gets, it's usually not to that big of a deal. Um, as far as planes go there, they're made to take it. I know.

Sometimes if you're sitting on the wing and looking out, Oh yeah, you can be a little distressing seeing those things almost flapping, But they're meant to move a little. They're supposed to do that. Yeah, so don't worry. Uh, the wing is not going to snap off most likely. Now, remember when we talked about cars and how it seems like they're made terribly today because they come apart, but they're actually designed like that to make them like easier

to take a crash. The same thing with the plane if they were just completely rigid and brittle, and the wing might actually snap off. So it's supposed to flap a little bit in turbulence. Yeah, And the other part of that is injuries. Um, the f a A said forty four injuries in two thousand sixteen due to turbulence nine plus million people flying. That is not a lot of injuries. Yeah, I think the most exceedingly rare, Like

there was thirteen and two thousand thirteen. Oddly, there was seventeen in two thousand seventeen, and between ninth teen eighty and two thousand eight there were only three deaths from turbulence. So it is very very rare. And one of the reasons it's not way worse and it's actually getting even better is because pilots are able to predict where the turbulence is coming. Because number one, they're trained to see

signs of it. But also there are a entire network of people on planet Earth back down on the ground who are working to let those pilots know what places to avoid and why. Yeah, so when they when they go to take off, there's a few types of turbulence to look out for. Convective that is, you know, kind

of the standard thunderstorm turbulence that you might expect. Yeah, Like when air on the Earth surface gets warm, it rises and it can create clouds as it carries water vapor up and cools, and the taller the cloud, the more turbulent there is in there, that's right. Uh. Then there's mountain wave of turbulence, and that's when air is just literally cresting over the top of a mountain, uh, and wave like you would see in the ocean. Yeah,

because it's all fluid. I mean air and water they're both fluid, you know, so of course they would break like that. You don't want to get your little plane caught up in a breaking air wave, no, uh. And then finally you have the clear air turbulence, and that's the toughest to predict because it's not like you see a big mountain range or lightning popping off in the foreground. That is just air colliding with warm air and cold

air colliding with one another. Yeah, so it forms jet streams, right, and those those that's that can be problematic because the the difference in um, the direction that the winds moving in, the speed it's moving in can really wreak havoc on your plane. And when you're cruising through a patch like that very quickly, all of those little bumps and jostles and turns come together to make what we think of as turbulence. That's right. So that is uh, what turbulence is.

Let's take a little break here and we're gonna talk about how these pilots can avoid it. If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to just chuck sew shoon. So before they even take off, they have started avoiding turbulence. When they get their flight plan together, they don't just say, you know, we're flying from Atlanta to l A. So let's just you know, take a left turn after takeoff and fly west until we get to l A. Maybe you've been taken out. Yeah,

it's a very you know, uh, it's very planned out. Uh. And although they can't predict every bit of turbulence, they can certainly say, well, we know there's a mountain range here and there is a thunderstorm going on here, so we're gonna set our flight plan accordingly, right exactly, so they start off on the right foot the UM. They also have like little handy weather maps too, because storms can develop even after you've already taken off that weren't predicted.

And they can also line up too, so you might have to choose what storm you actually have to go through if you have to write, and so they have weather instrumentation that makes it real simple to choose. Like a storm up ahead that's yellow says if you have a green alternative, choose the green one. Ones that are read it says. You're gonna have to course correct basically UM.

And when you course correct, you basically have to get in touch with UM air traffic Control and say, hey, I know we weren't planning on going up an extra ten thou feet, but I need to fly over this turbulence for a little while, and they'll say do it. And you fly up, you go over the tribulence, you say,

can I come back down now? And They're like, we we've been waiting for you to ask, buddy, come on back down, and you go back down to your original flight plan, or you may not, or they may say, you know what, since you went this far out of the way to avoid this thing, why don't you just take this course instead, right, and you have a new flight plan after that? Exactly. You gotta be nimble up there, you gotta be quick, and you have your hands on

the sticks, right. Isn't that what they call him sticks? I think so. I'll bet they do call him sticks. Can you see pilot pilots calling him there? Sure, ladies and gentlemen, got my hands on the sticks. I've never heard that. You haven't, not from a pilot to a passenger. Okay, but I think that doesn't leave the cockpit. You know

what happens in the cockpit talk um. So the mountain turbulence, that is uh pretty easy to predict because mountains are there, and if a pilot has driven, driven, have flown past the Rockies or the Andies or any big mountain range, they probably already know what's to expect there and have routed their plane in such a way where they're not going to get the worst of it. They can also tell by the clouds that are there. There's some called lenticular clouds, which are lens shaped, but I think it

actually kind of traces the contour of a wave. But in cloud form you can be like, well, I've gotta stay out of there because there's breaking waves of wind right there. Yeah. So yeah, there's things they can do visually. The problem is is the clear air turbulence. I mean they don't call it clear air, I exactly, and I mean it really is like it can be really really rough, not just because it comes out of nowhere, but because the differences in speed between one spot and another so

pronounced that it can really jar and jostle you. Yeah, for those The thing, and this is kind of cool. The thing they count on the most, uh, is talking to other pilots. There's a lot of planes up there, and chances are if you're flying anywhere in the United States, there's another plane on more or less your route just a few minutes ahead of you, right, And so they they're always in touch with one another. Uh, it's not

even you know, they share information. It's not like a delta pilot won't be like, hey, the Southwest guys behind us, but don't tell them what's so they're always warning each other about what to expect, how bad it is, um, whether or not you need to really alter your route or maybe just park it at a certain altitude. Right. And so when they get this info, they'll say, uh, ladies and gentlemen, please put your seatbelts on, get out of the bathroom. Uh. Flight attendants put them carts up.

I think it's how they put it. That's in pilot lingo. And that's usually when some somebody gets up, it's like, oh, I really need to go. That's the moment I'm like, I have to go to the bathroom so bad. Yeah yeah, um. But if you're not getting up, and even if they aren't telling you to um to put your seatbelt on, if you're just sitting in your seat, you should always keep your seatbelt on, just because there is such thing

as clearer. Turbulent catches everybody by surprise, and then all of a sudden you're like floating up against the ceiling, which is bad enough for you, but you can also come down another poor unsuspecting travelers too. It's like about floating people who like smashing into the ceiling for a moment. Yeah. Um, it's like people who don't wear the seatbelt in the

back seat. It's like, you're not just putting your own life in danger when you cut it getting a head on collision, you're flying forward past the people in the front who did have their seatbelts on, and your feet and your fists in your head are taking their heads off with you. Yeah, you know what I mean. You got to wear your seatbelt in the back seat. Check so they get about if they're talking to other pilots in the air, they get a five to ten minute warning.

If they're getting a warning from the ground, that's about twenty minutes up to twenty minutes. So that's that's plenty of time. That's why that's why it works so well. That's why you don't get more severe cases of turbulence because everyone's in contact at all times, making sure that you don't feel the worst of it, which is great. They also figured out that you can't put two planes too close together because planes create weake and that creates turbulence,

and they you that out the hard way. Apparently planes have crashed from following too close coming in for a landing. Don't do it on the road either. No, certainly not, although apparently it does save your gas mileage. Yeah, behind like a semi or something. Yeah, I mean that's why they do it in NASCAR, right, But it's not safe. No, don't, don't do it. You're no NASCAR driver unless you are a NASCAR driver listening to this, in which case you do what you're doing. Well. Thanks for joining us on

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