Flying can be stressful enough without 1,000-foot drops and severe shaking. But that’s what the passengers on a recent Delta flight out of Salt Lake City had to endure as a wave of turbulence rocked their plane. Passengers reported having to hold a cabin crew member on the ground to stop them from being launched into the ceiling.
If it seems like turbulence stories have been more frequent recently, that’s not just because short videos of drinks carts and phones flying around are popular on TikTok; changes in our atmosphere wrought by climate change are making turbulence more likely.
What Causes Turbulence?
Unpredictable atmospheric disturbances cause turbulence. A plane traveling through air currents is like a boat crossing the ocean. Mountains, storms, and other air pressure-altering features increase the choppiness of that ocean.
Most turbulence consists of small, air wavelets that might do little more than spill a drink. Severe turbulence, however, can cause significant and abrupt changes in a plane's path or altitude. This type of turbulence may cause pilots to lose control of their plane momentarily. One such incident caused a 73-year-old man to die of a heart attack on a flight from London to Singapore in 2024.
While turbulence-linked fatalities are thankfully rare, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) logged over 200 turbulence injuries between 2009 and 2023. These incidents are particularly hazardous for flight crew members who are less likely to be wearing seatbelts should sudden turbulence strike. The recent Delta flight ended with 25 passengers hospitalized.
Read More: How Do Airplanes Fly? An Aerospace Engineer Explains The Physics Of Flight
How Our Warming Planet Increases The Risk Of Turbulence
These extreme turbulence events may soon become more common. Climate change will alter our planet's upper atmosphere, and experts say that this will increase the likelihood of temperature shifts and choppy wind patterns.
"We can expect a doubling or tripling in the amount of severe turbulence around the world in the next few decades," Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading, said in an article for the BBC.
Williams added that the duration of each of these incidents could also double or triple over that time. Tracking this rise is Ignacio Gallego-Marcos, a computational fluid dynamics expert who records turbulence of more than 10,000 flight paths through a site called Turbli.
The World’s Most Turbulent Flights
Gallego-Marcos’s site ranks turbulent flights by calculating their average eddy dissipation rate (EDR). This measures how quickly the turbulent air streams dissipate their energy — stronger turbulence causes higher EDRs.
- Turbli’s data shows that if you want to avoid turbulence, avoid flying to Santiago — four routes to the Chilean capital are among the top ten most turbulent.
- The Argentinian city of Mendoza and the capitals of Nepal and Bhutan also feature heavily in the top ten. These routes all fly over mountainous terrain, which chops up stable air currents and dramatically increases the risk of turbulent flights.
- While there are no North American routes in the top 10, Turbli reports that the most turbulent flight on the continent is the journey from Albuquerque to Denver, as planes are chucked around while crossing the Rocky Mountains.
- In a similar vein, Europe’s most turbulent flights pass over the Alps.
Some particularly turbulent flights go nowhere near mountains. These routes are victims of “clear-air” turbulence, caused by the fast-moving air in jet streams. The strength of these streams is affected by air temperature, and our warming planet is increasing clear-air turbulence.
A 2023 study found that incidents of severe clear-air turbulence on routes over the North Atlantic were 55 percent more common in 2020 than they had been 40 years prior. Over the continental U.S., incidents have increased by 41 percent. As clear-air turbulence is harder to predict than other types of turbulence, this could lead to more injuries on buffeted flights.
One source of comfort is that aviation companies design their planes to handle turbulence — the wings of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner can flex upwards by 25 feet — and that flying remains a very safe way to travel. But increased turbulence is just another way that climate change is making our planet a riskier place to live in and travel.
Read More: What Are the Safest Seats on a Plane? And 13 Other Airplane Safety Questions Answered
Article Sources
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