Buckle Up for Bumpier Skies

We’ve all experienced flights through some pockets of fitful air; less commonly have we endured the sort of disturbance that rises to the official level of “moderate.” But the more global temperatures rise, and the more widespread “clear-air turbulence” becomes, the more likely it is that we’ll hit the sort of bumps we’ll tell people about later. For The New Yorker, Burkhard Bilger sets out to find the jounciest flights he can, and to help us all understand why the air up there is getting so restless.

Thanks to decades of such refinements, today’s jets may be the world’s most reliable machines. Flying in them is less likely to kill you than walking on staircases.

It’s the sky that’s grown more unreliable. Fierce storms and erratic winds are increasingly common with climate change. But the rise in clear-air turbulence, often far from storms and undetectable by radar, is especially alarming. Since 1979, clear-air turbulence has increased by as much as fifty-five per cent over the North Atlantic and forty-one per cent over the United States. If temperatures continue to rise unabated, it could more than double by the middle of the century. Death by turbulence is still vanishingly rare, but Flight SQ321 did have one fatality. Geoffrey Kitchen, a retired insurance salesman from Bristol, England, on holiday with his wife of fifty years, died before the plane landed. Its sudden plunge had come as such a shock, it seems, that it gave him a heart attack.