El Niño’s likely increased CAT events are coming—airlines need to be prepared.
Reading University’s professor of atmospheric science, Paul Williams, gave an informative and insightful speech on the increase in Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) due to El Niño’s impact on the North American skies. His analysis points out a SIGNIFICANT SAFETY RISK TO AVIATION. The below article relates the technical explanation of the increase in these weather phenomena and the magnitude of their impact.
SAFETY is the province of Safety Management Systems and its risk prospective is heavily driven by Flight Operational Quality Assurance, Aviation Safety Reporting Program, Voluntary Disclosure Reporting Program and other data collecting systems that portray the airline’s recent experiences. That information is aggregated, analyzed, and prioritized to provide the Director of_Safety with an agenda for the Safety Team’s review and action plan.
Perhaps a Aircraft Dispatcher might bring Dr. Williams’ paper to the safety team’s attention, but the initiative might come from the Chief Pilot or the Director of Flight attendants. All of these members of the Airline’s Safety Culture have [hopefully] enhanced risk awareness and likely would flag this meteorological warning as requiring SMS attention.
A well-established SMS team, especially one that closely follows the book, starts with these functions but should include customer service management, the baggage handling organization, the maintenance team, purchasing office and the full 3600 personnel of the airline. Ideas like these may flow from a CAT risk review:
- Pre-boarding announcements reinforcing the importance of keeping seat belt on throughout the flight;
- The FA preflight briefings to emphasize the cabin crew’s attention to seat belts, especially when the cockpit clicks on the warning light;
- The aircraft inventory stores organization starts a check of the seat belt inventory at all stations, especially the seat extender supply for obese passengers
- The MX representative sends a bulletin to the avionics AMTs to recalibrate the WX radars, the software and cockpit screen to assure that the pilots have a clear and accurate image of CAT phenomena.
- Instability of flight not only impacts the passenger cabin, but the torque of an oscillation can create dangerous situations below. Poor weight and balance can further exacerbate regaining control, cargo needs to be carefully secured to limit shift in CG (forward/back; right/left) and significant baggage movement could add to the crisis. The ground crew management will reissue guidance to their ramp crews and remind station managers that these usually routine steps deserve greater attention.
The singular benefit of these SMS reviews is to raise the awareness of every airline employee. Safety Culture, well inculcated, reaches all and the discipline’s history is replete with individuals, seemingly removed from the operations, “sees-and-says” or even gets involved in proactive saves!!!
Flying soon? Airplane turbulence may be worse than usual. Here’s why
by: Alix Martichoux
(NEXSTAR) – Taking a flight this winter? You may need to brace for a bumpier journey than usual, as a climate phenomenon could be cranking up the turbulence.
That’s because we’re in an El Niño year — and it may even end up being a historically strong El Niño winter. El Niño doesn’t just affect droughts, heat waves and hurricane season — new research suggests it could also impact how much turbulence planes experience in the air.
Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading, presented his research on the subject during a meeting of the American Meteorological Society earlier this year.
The science is complicated, but essentially Williams found a link between EL NIÑO or La Niña years and the AMOUNT OF CLEAR-AIR TURBULENCE (or CAT) in the atmosphere.
‘Historically strong’ El Niño possible: What it means for winter
CAT is one type of turbulence you might experience while flying. It happens when skies look clear — there are no major storms — but the plane shakes anyway. It’s caused by curves in the jet stream (air currents that circle around the planet), pilot Stuart Walker explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Along those curves there are pockets of wind shear, or a sudden change in the wind’s direction or speed.
As those winds suddenly hit the plane from one side or another, they can cause the plane to rock, Walker said.
This is where El Niño comes in. Williams found that during El Niño years, there were more wind shear anomalies over the United States, Mexico, Southeast Asia and Australia. In La Niña years, the opposite was true — there was weaker wind shear.
More wind shear means more clear-air turbulence, hence the connection between El Niño and bumpy flights.
In his talk, Williams cited a paper that observed the largest spike in pilots reporting turbulence occurred in the winter of 1997-1998 — one of the strongest El Niño winters ever recorded.
After crunching the numbers, Williams found “when there’s a strong El Niño event, there is 50% more moderate-or-greater CAT over large parts of the U.S. and the North Atlantic. And when there’s a strong La Niña event, there’s about 50% less moderate-or-greater CAT than normal.”
The only place that didn’t see a connection between El Niño and more wind shear was Europe, Williams said.
What does this mean for your next flight, now that El Niño is ramping up toward its peak? The research doesn’t make it possible to predict exactly when or where pilots will see more turbulence, but it does give an idea of how much turbulence they may encounter over the course of a season.
Plus, clear-air turbulence isn’t anything new — even if research suggests it’s happening more frequently. (Another bit of Williams’ research published in 2019 also found that global warming has been leading to increased air turbulence.) Pilots know how to handle CAT when they come across it.
“The good news about clear-air turbulence, though, is it typically does not last but a couple thousand feet. So, if we just descend a couple thousand or climb a couple thousand, we can usually fly out of some of that rough air,” Walker said.
If you experience an especially bumpy ride this winter, you can buckle up, take a deep breath, and probably blame El Niño.
