Though it is usually more nerve-wracking than dangerous, a handful of passengers suffer injuries due to rough air each year
, disturbed from a calmer state by various forces. If you’ve ever watched a placid thread of rising smoke break up into ever more disorganized swirls, you’ve witnessed turbulence.the most common turbulence experienced by flyersJust as ocean waves break on a beach, air also forms waves as it encounters mountains. While some air passes smoothly over and onward, some air masses crowd against the mountains themselves, left with nowhere to go but up.
And though it’s easy to understand turbulence created by thunderstorms, a relatively new discovery by researchers is that storms can generate bumpy conditions in faraway skies.
This composite image was created at London Heathrow Airport's runway 09L between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. Mornings at Heathrow are typically some of the busiest times for arriving aircraft, as waves of widebody jets from Asia and North America complete their long haul flights to London.Part of the anxiety around turbulence is the fear of the aircraft failing.
Could airplane design be changed to eliminate the experience of turbulence altogether? Smith says likely not, at least in the near term. One area of research is looking at the possibility of instant reaction to sudden gusts by altering the airflow around the surface of the wing itself—though Smith warns that this is an extremely difficult problem to solve while keeping an airplane lightweight, low-cost and energy efficient.
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