Most people who have flown have likely felt their stomach drop when the "fasten seat belt" sign switches on during a bumpy flight, but turbulence can be severe and experts warn it's becoming more common.The interior of Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 is pictured after an emergency landing at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport on Tuesday.
Turbulence — a sudden, violent shift in air flow — is the most common cause of airline accidents involving injuries, according to a. From 2009 through 2018, the U.S. agency found that turbulence accounted for more than a third of reported airline accidents and most resulted in one or more serious injuries.Climate change is making flights more turbulent, meteorologist says.
"It can be difficult to avoid because it doesn't show up on the weather radar in the flight deck. A detailed analysis of the meteorological circumstances and the particular type of turbulence that caused today's fatality will take some time," Williams said.
The last turbulence death on a commercial flight was in 2009, Williams said, and the last death caused by clear-air turbulence on a commercial flight was in 1997, on a United Airlines flight from Tokyo to Honolulu. "With climate change, we get warmer oceans, which increases the probability for storms to manifest in this way that pilots just have not been trained, in general to detect," he said.