One minute, passengers may be sleeping, eating, or enjoying an unremarkable flight. The next: chaos. That’s the scenario that unfolded in repeated high-profile incidents of turbulence in recent months.
Last week, more than 30 people were treated for injuries after an Air Europa flight hit turbulence while travelling from Spain to Uruguay. In May, one person died and dozens were hospitalized after a Singapore Airlines jet encountered “sudden extreme turbulence” while flying near the coast of Myanmar. Patrick Smith, an airline pilot for three decades who runs the Ask the Pilot blog, said in an interview that he gets questions from the public about turbulence “every day, all the time.
” He thinks there isn’t a good understanding of what turbulence is, what it can and can’t do, and how pilots deal with it. But he gets why travellers might be uneasy. “If you’re predisposed to flight anxiety, rough air is going to make the experience more nerve-racking,” he said.
While extreme incidents can happen, experts say planes are built to withstand the forces of turbulence and that pilots are trained on how to respond to it. Passengers have little control about the conditions their planes are facing, but safety experts and current and retired pilots told The Washington Post that there are some safety tools fliers can take into their own hands..
