Eli5: why isn’t a plane experiencing turbulence considered dangerous?
In: Engineering
When you’re 25,000 feet up in the air, plus or minus a few tens of feet is nothing. That’s all turbulence is: the plane runs into a wind sheer that suddenly increases or decreases lift, or it runs into an updraft or downdraft. And then the plane adjusts or leaves the problem area, and that’s it.
When the plane is only 100-300 feet up because it’s coming in to land, yeah that sudden loss of lift or downdraft can be *extremely* dangerous. However, pilots and air traffic controllers are trained to recognize weather conditions that cause turbulence near the ground and to avoid it. It’s not something to worry about because pilots make sure it doesn’t happen.
Edit: structurally, the wings are designed and tested to handle a load that is like 5x greater than the maximum performance expected from the plane, and then the pilots fly the plane at like, a fifth of that maximum performance. No turbulence is strong enough to shake a plane apart. If the weather ever got that bad, they’d see it well ahead of time and fly around it. Avoiding turbulence is 90% about keeping the flight pleasant for the passengers and 10% not putting a teeny tiny extra bit of wear and tear on the parts.
EDIT2: [Here is a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–LTYRTKV_A) showing a wing load test for an Airbus A350. Look how much those wings are designed to flex before breaking. Turbulence isn’t going to do anything.
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