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.
The atmosphere is made up of moving streams of air, and when two or more such streams collide they create uneven flow patterns which, for a plane passing through them, would appear as a multitude of strong winds pushing the plane in alternating directions.
All commercial planes are tested extensively to be able to withstand such turbulence. It’ll cause some shaking but no structural damage unless something else was already wrong with the plane.
Among the currently unsolved mysteries of physics, Turbulence lies right there with black holes and String Theory.
As far as humans understand right now, turbulence is a measure of chaos in fluids. That’s pretty much all we humane know about turbulence.
Sometimes the wind is gusty, and sometimes it moves in different directions in different places. When you’re in a plane, your wings are very good at catching gusts of wind, and you can quickly move from a region where air is moving up to one where air is moving down, and back into a region where air is moving up again. That’s what causes turbulence, and while there are dangerous things to fly in that cause turbulence, like thunderstorms, pilots are taught to not fly into them. There are many other things that cause turbulence without being a danger to the aircraft.
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If you imagine air and a liquid turbulence is like ocean waves. The same way a boat goes up and down ON the water an airplane goes up and down as it hits dense updrafts or warmer air pockets as well and spinning and swirling air.
Warm air rises, cool air descends. Turbulence. I don’t like it.
Well, try to get some sleep anyways.
I am not afraid of turbulence and I know planes are built to withstand it but I always think what if an engine went bad and the plane is shaking instead
Imagine it like potholes on a road. They cause the car to shake and rumble a bit but nothing really serious happens unless it is knee deep. Fortunately the air is fluid and can’t let that harsh of a pothole happen that’s why it’s not likely for a plane to get damaged at all by turbulence.
The ones that flight attendants hit the ceiling are the ones that are wild and the reason that you should want to always wear your seatbelts but again, the plane wouldn’t get hurt.
I once heard someone describe a plane flying in the air like moving through Jell-O. If you shake the bowl everything else will shake but the plane won’t just fall to the ground
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