In December of 2022, Flight UA1722 from Maui to San Francisco was reported by media to have plunged half of its altitude in a matter of seconds due to severe turbulence. Just last week, a Lufthansa flight from Austin, TX to Germany reportedly fell thousands of feet, sending seven people to the hospital for injuries after an emergency landing.
Is this just sensationalized reporting by the media, or do commercial jets actually plummet from the sky and recover just before crashing? Why and how does this happen?
In: 12
Turbulence means you meet air that goes fast in a strange direction, and maybe downward. So yea a strong wind down will carry you down. It’s extremely rare the wind is steady for miles, so meeting a down wind is something short, and followed by a wind sideways or upward… this means that you won’t fall down much, you are blown around, but in average, you are not blown in a specific direction.
Something that does happen more often is the pilot fly down or up or whatever to try get out the turbulent area.More likely you are flown down half your altitude to get out of an high altitude turbulence, this is way more likely than being blown down thousand of feet.
This said, 1000 feet is not much, you can be moved down 1000 feet by wind, the problem in this case is how high are you, being blown 1000 feet down when you fly at 1500 is of course serious and scary. But don’t worry, the worse winds are not usually close to ground and if that’s the case, they tend to be very small in dimension, so you “poke a hole in it”.
Latest Answers