What exactly is turbulence, and is it at all an indication of danger during a flight?
In: Physics
Plane shakes when it gets hit by changing wind directions (usually by flying through areas with lots of strong wind currents going a bunch of directions).
It makes the way the air flows over the wings change by enough, quickly enough, that the wings make less or more lift very suddenly, so the whole plane drops or rises suddenly. Bad turbulence is bigger, sharper, harder drops and lurches.
Yes, if a plane doesn’t change course around a storm, turbulence can very easily rip the plane apart. But, they know that, so the turbulence you feel as a passenger is almost always technically safe even if it’s pretty bad to ride through. But…sometimes people make mistakes, sometimes the weather does unexpected things, sometimes something is wrong with the plane because they didn’t anticipate a problem X years down the line.
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