101–110 of 163 posts
Obviously the wings need to lock into place for landing, and many structural elements of the craft would need to be redesigned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This deserves to be the top comment. Turbulence accident statistics are only going to ever reflect clear air turbulence if the aircraft sustained detectable damage or passenger(s) sustain serious enough injuries.
In that case what’s the explanation for clear air turbulence events having an exactly proportionally lower rate of causing damage and injury such that the rate has remained flat despite the increase in events? What’s making turbulence safer? Edit: this isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m very interested in any proposed actual mechanism. As someone who is very alarmed by turbulence I’d love a reason to believe it’s getti…
Therefore both can be true at the same time: turbulence events are increasing, but we are also getting better at predicting, avoiding, and dealing with these events.
One thing that’s happened in the past couple of years along that air corridor is the squeezing of flight paths out of Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, and Afghan airspace.
Planes taking more circuitous routes, giving them less options to avoid weather conditions, much of the flight over hot mountainous terrain… could be a contributing factor to increasing incidents of dangerous turbulence affecting flights, even if the conditions themselves haven’t become more common.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we really not record turbulence sensor data off the airplanes and download it when they’re on the ground? I’m also surprised that these airplanes have on demand satellite TV streaming to these airplanes but airlines claim that it costs 100k to add that to existing planes. There’s just no way it’s 100k per plane - there must be a cheap way to retrofit the data without having it be reliable since it’s opportunistic.…
> Do we really not record turbulence sensor data off the airplanes and download it when they’re on the ground? No, accelerometer data is only recorded to the FDR. Which has a limited storage window (1-24 hours depending on the aircraft) and is slow to download requiring moderately specialized equipment and a technician to carry out the task. Aircraft downtime and technician hours are both expensive and in short suppl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do we really not record turbulence sensor data off the airplanes and download it when they’re on the ground? No, accelerometer data is only recorded to the FDR. Which has a limited storage window (1-24 hours depending on the aircraft) and is slow to download requiring moderately specialized equipment and a technician to carry out the task. Aircraft downtime and technician hours are both expensive and in short suppl…
Meanwhile an accelerometer, microcontroller and a years worth of storage for the data probably all could be made with $5 worth of parts and a summer intern...
Could this be internet-enabled flight bias? Now that we have more and more WiFi enabled flights, more people posting about it on socials...so public awareness grows but as indicated before only incident-related stats are being recorded. One can extrapolate if incidents including damage or injury are not increasing per capita of flights it's probably not a trend.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly no detectable trend in that data. But the accident frequency is so low that the random variation dominates and makes it impossible to distinguish any trend. What is demonstrably increasing is CAT, due to climate change. But considering how infrequent these incidents are we might not see a clear increase for several decades.
Do we really not record turbulence sensor data off the airplanes and download it when they’re on the ground? I’m also surprised that these airplanes have on demand satellite TV streaming to these airplanes but airlines claim that it costs 100k to add that to existing planes. There’s just no way it’s 100k per plane - there must be a cheap way to retrofit the data without having it be reliable since it’s opportunistic.…
Edit: Turns out this already includes turbulence data, and this is streamed real-time! https://community.wmo.int/en/activity-areas/aircraft-based-o...
> France is doing it every 4 minutes for their planes
What are they doing exactly? Are you referring to the article?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do we really not record turbulence sensor data off the airplanes and download it when they’re on the ground? No, accelerometer data is only recorded to the FDR. Which has a limited storage window (1-24 hours depending on the aircraft) and is slow to download requiring moderately specialized equipment and a technician to carry out the task. Aircraft downtime and technician hours are both expensive and in short suppl…
Meanwhile an accelerometer, microcontroller and a years worth of storage for the data probably all could be made with $5 worth of parts and a summer intern...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly no detectable trend in that data. But the accident frequency is so low that the random variation dominates and makes it impossible to distinguish any trend. What is demonstrably increasing is CAT, due to climate change. But considering how infrequent these incidents are we might not see a clear increase for several decades.
Do we really not record turbulence sensor data off the airplanes and download it when they’re on the ground? I’m also surprised that these airplanes have on demand satellite TV streaming to these airplanes but airlines claim that it costs 100k to add that to existing planes. There’s just no way it’s 100k per plane - there must be a cheap way to retrofit the data without having it be reliable since it’s opportunistic.…
However that data belongs to each airline.