Already and this is this is the daily this is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Tuesday, the twenty eighth of May. I'm Sam, I'm Sara. In the last week, there have been two major incidents of turbulence hitting commercial flights, causing injury. Yesterday, twelve were injured on a Qatar Airways
flight from Dohart to Dublin while in the air over Turkey. Now, in today's podcast, we're going to talk to a professor of aviation about why we're seeing a sudden spike in turbulence, if there's anything to be worried about, if we've got a flight soon, and why you should always wear a seat belt. But first, Sarah, what is making headlines this morning?
As many as two thousand people are feared trapped beneath the rubble of a landslide in Papua New Guinea. The landslide struck a remote village in p Andng's Anger Province early on Friday morning. Local authorities are currently working with the UN after rescue efforts were hampered by road blockages and shifting terrain around the site of the incident. The UN and PMG's Defense Force are providing emergency shelter, food and water to those affected.
Regional property values and rent prices have increased to record high levels. That's according to new data from core Logic. House prices in the regions are also increasing at a higher rate than homes in the capital cities. In the three months to April, property values in regional Australia grew by two point one percent. That's compared to one point seven percent growth in capital cities. Over the same period, we also saw rents go up in regional areas. They
grew six point three percent. That's up from four point nine percent.
As state of emergency has been lifted in New Caledonia after deadly riots in the French territory this month. Seven people died during protests, which came after France's lower house passed a bill to allow French residents who have lived in New Caledonia for ten years to vote in local elections. Protesters, some of whom belonged to the island's indigenous Canaric people,
argued the bill would threaten their political influence. French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed the state of emergency would be lifted on Tuesday morning, after he visited the region last week.
And today's good news. Australian paleontologists have discovered the fossils of three never before seen ancient animal species, referred to as the echidna puss. The monitorum species has characteristics of both the Echidna and the platypus. Fossils dating back over one hundred million years were found in Lightning Ridge in New South Wales. Professor Tim Flannery said it's like discovering a whole new civilization, so Zara, This podcast episode might not be for everyone, right.
I was going to say, I think if you are someone that is a scared flier or an anxious flier, and or someone who's getting on a plane like I am later this week and just not in the headspace to want to listen to an entire episode dedicated to turbulence, feel free to skip today's episode. We will be back again tomorrow. But look, it's not for everyone.
Yeah, But I do think that these events over the last couple of weeks, mainly the Singapore Airlines flight and now this Guitar Airlines flight, has led to some very interesting questions coming up in you know chat groups.
I was going to say, it's been dominating the group chat for me about whether or not this is a new thing. Yeah, this sort of very violent turbulence that we've seen injuries and in some cases even death as a result of so very keen to listen to this chat.
There's also a whole climate change element we're going to get into, so instead of us hypothesizing, I put these questions to Professor Jason Middleton. He was the head of unsw's Department of Aviation from nineteen ninety five until twenty seventeen. He's also a commercial pilot himself. Now since then he's been an emeritus professor looking at airborne research. Here's that chat. Professor Middleton, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this morning.
I'm pleased to be here.
So we've seen two major turbulence events in the past week. Is there something bigger going on here?
No, I don't think so. The whole issue of turbulence is that it's highly unpredictable and it occurs because of the basically the heat engine of the sun. The sun creates a lot of heat on the surface of the ocean, and that heat is transferred to the atmosphere and creates clouds that is always going to be with us, and it is difficult to predict.
Has there been more turbulence recorded in recent years than there was, say thirty or forty years ago, that.
Or may or may not be the case of it's been recorded. Remember that these days everyone has phones, everyone has powerful equipment to record everything, whereas in the old days they didn't. So a lot of things that are here to happen more often now perhaps don't happen more often or only just recorded. It's happening more often.
Right, interesting, So basically what I'm hearing from you is that you've seen I mean, we've had the Singapore Airlines incident last week, We've had now a Qatar Airlines incident in the last couple of days. Are you saying that this is no cause for alarm and just almost kind of part of air travel, but it's just being recorded more well at the moment.
We can talk about the possible influences of climate change a little later, But yeah, the earth is warming fello drastically in some ways, but in other ways. The impact on local turbulence, for example, is unlikely to even be measurable.
Okay, so let's talk about that climate change idea. So the general principle is experts have come out and said as climate change progresses, turbulence will become more frequent.
I think that's true. But because there'll be more energy in the atmosphere, the whole one is greater solar heating, you've got greater evaporation. And for people who want to know the technical stuff, once evaporation happens, the water vapor turns ultimately into droplets. From water vapor to droplets, there's a release of what's called latent heat, the release of a lot of heat, and that helps boil the clouds up or make some look as though they're boiling upwards,
and in fact they are. The convective turbulence is going right up in the atmosphere to way above where normal airliners fly.
You wear a commercial pilot yourself. Give me a sense of what it feels like as a pilot when there is an incident of turbulence.
I actually went into a thunderstorm inadvertently. Once the sky gets a lot darker, the turbulence gets stronger. You have your auter pilot on to try and help you keep the aircraft straight and level, the turbulence gets the point where if you're not banging your head against the roof because the seatbell is holding you down, you're banging your
head inadvertently against the side of the cockpit. When you get to that stage, you do a U turret and gave back on your reciprocal direction and get out of there as quickly as possible. That's the standard process, and it's fairly scary because ultimately very severe turbulence can cause damage to the aeroplane.
Could it be severe enough that the plane itself could crash.
Well, yes, or you have structural damage to the control services for example. So yeah, all airlines will try and avoid turbulence, so I'll avoid big thunderstorms. Now, the weather radars that are in aeroplanes and not actually weather radars, they're a bit like the Bureau of Meteorologies radar. They
are rain radars. They only get reflection from decent sized water droplets, not from vapor, so that when you're flying in an area where there's rain, the radar, even on the best jets these days, will give you a lovely return of where the rainfall is intense, and you'll know then to avoid that. But areas surrounding that might still have strong updrafts and down drafts, but you don't see them in the radar. Probably there, but you don't see them in the radar.
So what you're saying is that there's ultimately a certain level of unforeseen risks that come with turbulence. Is there an effort in the aviation community to build tools that can better predict where that turbulence is coming from or is that almost like kind of predicting God.
Well, trouble with turbulence is that it's momentary. So for example, you can have a zone of turbulence which is really intense for one or two minutes with down drafted up, and then two minutes later it's gone. The meteorologists can say, look, the atmosphere is fairly unstable at the moment. We're going to have very intense growth of cumulus clouds and accumulate nimbus clouds. This will produce intense turbulence in patches. So we know it's going to happen, you don't know exactly
where it is. So if you look at a smoke from a fire, you'll see that you get these billows of turbulence and the billows of turbulence are hoighly arising. But along with that highly arising, you also get colder air from surrounding entering say into a cloud, and that color air is denser and it sinks. So in a cloud where you've got very strong updrafts, you will also have clean, dry air come in from outside at higher levels, sinking through that cloud, creating a very strong downburst. Now
sometimes they go out the bottom of the cloud. When they do that, they hit the ground. They're called microbursts. So an aeroplane one minute will be an updraft, the next minute will be in a downdraft, and next minute later the air will be relatively smooth.
That's really interesting, and I think ultimately a lot of our listeners at the moment are probably thinking about themselves and their own air travel and perhaps a holiday they've
got coming up this year or next year. Is it getting to the point where airlines should be enforcing seat belt rules whenever you're in your seat, or do we need to be thinking of extra safety precautions or are you kind of maintaining that position you gave me earlier that you know this is not out of the ordinary, it's just in the media common sense.
I mean you need to get up and go to the restroom. Occasionally when you're on a long site, I like to stretch my legs to avoid DVT, for example. So we do encourage people to get up and move around a little bit. But the safety issue there was that if everyone who was sitting had their seat belts on it, then probably only the cabin crew and two or three people who got up to go to the
restroom would be hurt. Now, most people are smart enough not to get up in the middle of meal service to try and get to the bathroom because the trolley's in the way. Nearly all of the passengers during that meal service should have had their seat belt on, even loosely, and then most of them wouldn't have been hurt. Yes, the poor old cabin crew would have still bounced off the ceiling. Now, there is one subtle point to this that I don't fully understand. It was in the afternoon.
If you've ever been in Singapore or Hong Kong, Singapore particular well, which is right in the equator, you'll find the big summer build ups happen. But Singapore ratio runs between noon and about two pm. After two pm, the big cloud build ups happen, and it gets quite intense the afternoon from two pm to about six seven pm, but also into the evening you get these huge cumulus build ups. Everyone knows they happen. They happen regularly. Why the crew didn't see these is a question that we'd
have to ask the crew to answer. They may not have seen that on the radar. The radar might have been showing no severe rainfall and those big talk cloud tails off and you won't necessarily get rainfall. But why they didn't look out the window and see this big boiling mass of white cloud, We don't know.
Maybe Professor Middleton to end, I think we'd all benefit from some reassuring words for somebody who's an expert in this sector. Why should people feel good about flying?
Well, generally it's the safest form of transport. All pilots of all airlines do a good job because you know their own skinners on the line. The pilot was always the first to the scene of the accident if there's an accident, right, and they do their best to fly safely as well. People should be confident just to sit in an airplane, but do as they're told, get in their seat, put the seat belt on, and enjoy the
fly as best they can. I would find the Singapore Lines tomorrow as readily as I would have flown with them last week. They're no less safe than they were last week or any other airline.
Good to hear from an expert who's dedicated his career to aviation. Professor Middleton, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks very much, Thanks so much for joining us on the daily ours this morning, and I hope if you are flying somewhere soon that you have a safe flight and apparently always keep your seat belt on. We'll be back again in your ears tomorrow morning. Until then, have a great day. My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Yunda Bunjelung Calcuttin woman from Gadaghl Country.
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