Spate of turbulence incidents could foreshadow future air travel

(NewsNation) — As millions of Americans are expected to fly home Monday and Tuesday after the long holiday weekend, experts say severe turbulence could become more frequent.

On Sunday, 12 passengers and crew were injured on a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Dublin. One passenger speaking with Irish radio said he saw “people hitting the roof” and food and drink flying everywhere.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner landed safely in Ireland, but eight people had to be taken to the hospital.

“A small number of passengers and crew sustained minor injuries in flight and are now receiving medical attention. The matter is now subject to an internal investigation,” Qatar Airways said in a statement.

The incident came days after severe turbulence on a Singapore Airlines flight left one passenger dead and more than 100 others injured. Some 48 people are still hospitalized.

People in the aviation industry are telling people to buckle up, warning travelers that although severe turbulence is rare, the events are happening more and there isn’t much that can be about it even with new weather spotting technology.

“We can say that the weather is definitely getting stronger, the winds are faster, the convective weather that we do see is a lot larger in scale, as far as altitude, but also distance-wise, and those type of convective areas,” commercial airline pilot Capt. Laura Einsetler told NewsNation.

Convection describes “vertical transport of heat and moisture in the atmosphere, especially by updrafts and downdrafts in an unstable atmosphere,” according to the National Weather Service.

Recent turbulence episodes over the past year include a flight in China last summer that injured two people; a Delta flight in August that hit severe turbulence about 40 miles outside Atlanta, catapulting passengers out of their seats; and an Allegiant Air flight last July from North Carolina to Florida, with one passenger saying it felt like “The Matrix.”

Despite the recent spate of events, serious injuries from turbulence are still relatively rare. From 2013 to 2022, the National Transportation Safety Board recorded more than 100 serious injuries in the United States.

Climate change playing a role

While turbulence-related fatalities are rare, injuries have piled up over the years. Some meteorologists and aviation analysts note that reports of turbulence encounters also have been increasing and point to the potential impacts that climate change may have on flying conditions.

Indeed, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Sunday there are indications that turbulence is up by about 15%, an increase he attributed to climate change.

“The reality is, the effects of climate change are already upon us in terms of our transportation,” Buttigieg said in an interview that aired on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

He explained that while fatal turbulence incidents like the one on Singapore Airlines are “rare,” the U.S. still needs to prepare to adapt to the changing climate.

“To be clear, something that extreme is very rare, but turbulence can happen, and sometimes it can happen unexpectedly. Our climate is evolving. Our policies and our technology and our infrastructure have to evolve accordingly, too,” he said.

In a study published last year in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists wrote that an analysis found “clear evidence of large increases” in clear-air turbulence over the last four decades. The increases were the largest over the United States and the North Atlantic, and severe-or-greater turbulence increased the most, “becoming 55% more frequent in 2020 than in 1979.”

The Hill and The Associated Press contributed to this report.