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| Prominent lawyer and former 9/11 Commission member Dana Hyde, 55, died aboard a business jet over New England last Friday due to severe turbulence. Climate change might be worsening such turbulence. |
The jet quickly hit very severe turbulence, forcing it to divert and make an emergency landing near Hartford, Connecticut. A person on the jet, Dana Hyde, 55, a prominent attorney who once served on the 9/11 commission, died in the incident.
It's unclear whether the passenger was wearing a seat belt, and it's still unknown how much damage the aircraft sustained.
However, deaths due to turbulence are quite rare.
This incident is part of a spate of recent reports of dangerous turbulence hitting aircraft.
Also last Friday, a Southwest flight hit severe turbulence over North Carolina, causing at least one passenger to pass out and causing other mayhem aboard.
A Lufthansa flight from Texas to Germany on March 1 encountered severe turbulence over Tennessee, the Associated Press reported. The flight was diverted to Virginia's Washington Dulles International Airport. Seven people aboard were injured.
In December, a flight near Hawaii hit dangerous turbulence, injuring 36 passengers, 11 of them seriously.
Turbulence is a serious concern for aviation expert, and the general public who take airline trips. As the Washington Post reports:
"Turbulence accounted for 37.6 percent of all accidents on large commercial airlines from 2009 through 2018 according to a 2021 National Transportation Safety Board report. The FAA reported 122 serious injuries as a result of turbulence over the same period."
Air turbulence has always been a hazard to air travelers. Anecdotes like this don't prove much, but it turns out there is some truth behind the recent headlines about increased turbulence.
Turbulence associated with storms can often observed and forecasted, and pilots routinely detour around the worst expected air bumps.
However, turbulence can happen in clear air away from storms. In those cases, nobody knows about the problem until a plane or commercial airliner runs into it. Usually, it's just those annoying bumps you feel on a airline flight. It's kind of feels like driving over the frost heaves on a rural Vermont road in March.
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| Aftermath of severe turbulence aboard a Lufthansa flight from Texas to Germany last Friday. The plane was diverted to Dulles airport in Virginia after the incident. |
However, the turbulence can get extreme, which is where you get your injuries in flight.
Weather patterns that cause air turbulence seems like it might be getting worse. .And like so many ills, climate change might be to blame.
Reports the Washington Post, quoting Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom:
"'Around the world, it has been clear that atmosphere dynamics have changed significantly since scientists first observed them via satellite data in the late 1970s," he said.
A property known as wind shear, the degree to which wind speeds vary at different altitudes, has increased by 15 percent since 1979, the research concluded.
Those differing winds create atmospheric disturbances like rippling or waves in the air. That forces a plane that encounters those conditions to jump up and down and sometimes sideways.
What might be happening, according to at least some scientists, is the speed of the jet stream is overall declining in the lower atmosphere but maintaining its strength higher up. That creates wind shear and turbulence in the transition zone between the slow winds and the stronger winds higher up.
That said, statistics on injuries caused by turbulence do not show a clear trend, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Many of the injuries caused by turbulence are among flight attendants. Often, they are helping passengers and not belted into their seats when an airliner encounters turbulence. If you're belted into your seat, you have a much lower chance of getting hurt during turbulence.
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