Due to climate change, turbulence is becoming more and more common during air travel. Particularly treacherous are so-called clear air turbulences, which cannot be predicted and occur out of the blue. The behavior of birds could now provide better information about the unpredictable nature of turbulence.
34 passengers are still in hospital. Extreme turbulence occurred on a Singapore Airlines flight last week. A 73-year-old passenger suffered a heart attack and died. Dozens of other passengers and crew members were injured. The plane had to make an unscheduled landing in Bangkok.
Just a few days later, further incidents involving severe turbulence occurred. Twelve people were injured on a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Dublin – although fortunately not nearly as seriously as on Singapore Airlines flight SQ321.
And a flight attendant was recently seriously injured on a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Izmir. The fact that we read about such incidents more often is not just due to the increased media attention. In fact, severe turbulence is increasing with climate change, as various studies show.
Most things can be predicted because modern aircraft are equipped with sophisticated weather radar systems. “We can predict around 75 percent of turbulence up to 18 hours in advance,” Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading, told the BBC. But: According to researchers at the University of Reading, the most unpleasant type, the so-called clear air turbulence, which literally occurs out of the blue and is therefore unpredictable, is increasing.
Climate change is causing clear air turbulence to occur more and more frequently, says Williams. “Simply put, climate change is increasing the temperature difference between the warm and cold air masses that meet in the upper atmosphere to form the jet stream. This effect makes the jet stream less stable and leads to more turbulence.”
Therefore, we are now looking at how these turbulences can be predicted better or at all. So far, pilots have only had to rely on reports from aircraft flying ahead. But nature itself could provide better information about how to predict the wobble or even how to deal with it. To do this, researchers look at the behavior of birds.
Most birds don’t fly as high as airplanes. But at least some of them rise extremely high. For example, frigate birds. “Their flight is a roller coaster ride,” Emily Shepard, an expert on bird flight and air currents at the University of Swansea in Wales, told the BBC.
The birds rely on thermals and wind to stay aloft for months and can fly at extreme altitudes, up to four kilometers above the ground. To reach this high altitude, they often capture strong updrafts in mountainous cumulus clouds – such clouds cockpit crews try to avoid due to the strong turbulence.
The birds take advantage of this. “They gain altitude in these very, very turbulent cloud systems,” says Shepard. Very little is still known about how birds manage to fly in a controlled manner.
This is what Shepard and her colleagues are researching. They do this by sometimes accompanying the birds in small aircraft. But there is also debate about equipping the animals with sensors to learn more about air movements and predict turbulence.
But research is not only relevant for forecasts. Analyzing the way birds use turbulence to their advantage could also be incorporated into the design of new aircraft in the future – especially in the area of VTOL aircraft that fly in urban areas.
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The original for this article “A special species of bird could now help against treacherous turbulence” comes from aeroTelegraph.