February 20, 2019 • 11 mins
If you’ve ever had a bumpy airplane ride, you know it’s nothing fun. But have you ever noticed that the pilots sometimes tell you ahead of time to buckle in? How do they know turbulence is ahead? Are they some kind of fortune teller? How can anyone see wind?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Mr. Chuck,
and there's Ms Jerry over there. That's Ms tu Succa.
This is, like I said, short stuff. Buckle up everyone. Yeah,
for the turbulent addition of short stuff. Have you ever
had a bad like really bad? No, not really bad? No,
(00:24):
Yeah I haven't either. You know, there's actually a classification
for that. It's not called really bad. It's called extreme
or severe. But there's three types of turbulence. There's light turbulence,
you know, it's kind of kind of shakes like your
drink a little bit. And I'm going on this again.
There's moderate, which is like your drink is now spilling
out of your cup. And then there's severe and that
(00:46):
is like the kind where people get hurt sometimes very
rarely die. But um I saw photos of a plane
ride from Santa Anna up to Seattle, I think, and
it was like a Delta flight and the drink cart
was on its side and like they have been serving
(01:07):
drinks and the thing the plane just hit turbulence, took
a two ft nose dive, and apparently one of the
flight attendants and the drink cart were on the ceiling
and it just came down. So it can get pretty bad,
but it's very very rare, it turns out. Yeah, So
if you haven't picked up on it, we're talking about
airplane turbulence and specifically when a pilot knows when they
(01:27):
come on there and say, you know, hold onto your
butts everyone, here we go in the next ten minutes.
I've always wondered, like, what the deal was, Well, now
we know. Now we know when we can just bother
every passenger next to us till the end of let
me you know how they realize, you know, when they
make this announcement. Yeah, if you really want to get
at somebody sleeping next to you on an airplane's attention,
(01:50):
don't just kind of elbow them, like just slowly increase
the pressure of your pointy elbow in the rib cage
until they wake up. That'll get them talking. Yeah, And regardless,
like you said, of how bad it gets, it's usually
not to that big of a deal. Um, as far
as planes go there, they're made to take it. I know.
Sometimes if you're sitting on the wing and looking out,
(02:11):
Oh yeah, you can be a little distressing seeing those
things almost flapping, But they're meant to move a little.
They're supposed to do that. Yeah, so don't worry. Uh,
the wing is not going to snap off most likely. Now,
remember when we talked about cars and how it seems
like they're made terribly today because they come apart, but
they're actually designed like that to make them like easier
to take a crash. The same thing with the plane
(02:33):
if they were just completely rigid and brittle, and the
wing might actually snap off. So it's supposed to flap
a little bit in turbulence. Yeah, And the other part
of that is injuries. Um, the f a A said
forty four injuries in two thousand sixteen due to turbulence
nine plus million people flying. That is not a lot
of injuries. Yeah, I think the most exceedingly rare, Like
(02:53):
there was thirteen and two thousand thirteen. Oddly, there was
seventeen in two thousand seventeen, and between ninth teen eighty
and two thousand eight there were only three deaths from turbulence.
So it is very very rare. And one of the
reasons it's not way worse and it's actually getting even
better is because pilots are able to predict where the
turbulence is coming. Because number one, they're trained to see
(03:17):
signs of it. But also there are a entire network
of people on planet Earth back down on the ground
who are working to let those pilots know what places
to avoid and why. Yeah, so when they when they
go to take off, there's a few types of turbulence
to look out for. Convective that is, you know, kind
of the standard thunderstorm turbulence that you might expect. Yeah,
(03:39):
Like when air on the Earth surface gets warm, it
rises and it can create clouds as it carries water
vapor up and cools, and the taller the cloud, the
more turbulent there is in there, that's right. Uh. Then
there's mountain wave of turbulence, and that's when air is
just literally cresting over the top of a mountain, uh,
and wave like you would see in the ocean. Yeah,
(04:01):
because it's all fluid. I mean air and water they're
both fluid, you know, so of course they would break
like that. You don't want to get your little plane
caught up in a breaking air wave, no, uh. And
then finally you have the clear air turbulence, and that's
the toughest to predict because it's not like you see
a big mountain range or lightning popping off in the foreground.
That is just air colliding with warm air and cold
(04:25):
air colliding with one another. Yeah, so it forms jet streams, right,
and those those that's that can be problematic because the
the difference in um, the direction that the winds moving in,
the speed it's moving in can really wreak havoc on
your plane. And when you're cruising through a patch like
that very quickly, all of those little bumps and jostles
(04:46):
and turns come together to make what we think of
as turbulence. That's right. So that is uh, what turbulence is.
Let's take a little break here and we're gonna talk
about how these pilots can avoid it. If you want
(05:11):
to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to
just chuck sew shoon. So before they even take off,
they have started avoiding turbulence. When they get their flight
plan together, they don't just say, you know, we're flying
(05:32):
from Atlanta to l A. So let's just you know,
take a left turn after takeoff and fly west until
we get to l A. Maybe you've been taken out. Yeah,
it's a very you know, uh, it's very planned out. Uh.
And although they can't predict every bit of turbulence, they
can certainly say, well, we know there's a mountain range
here and there is a thunderstorm going on here, so
(05:54):
we're gonna set our flight plan accordingly, right exactly, so
they start off on the right foot the UM. They
also have like little handy weather maps too, because storms
can develop even after you've already taken off that weren't predicted.
And they can also line up too, so you might
have to choose what storm you actually have to go
through if you have to write, and so they have
(06:17):
weather instrumentation that makes it real simple to choose. Like
a storm up ahead that's yellow says if you have
a green alternative, choose the green one. Ones that are
read it says. You're gonna have to course correct basically UM.
And when you course correct, you basically have to get
in touch with UM air traffic Control and say, hey,
(06:38):
I know we weren't planning on going up an extra
ten thou feet, but I need to fly over this
turbulence for a little while, and they'll say do it.
And you fly up, you go over the tribulence, you say,
can I come back down now? And They're like, we
we've been waiting for you to ask, buddy, come on
back down, and you go back down to your original
flight plan, or you may not, or they may say,
you know what, since you went this far out of
the way to avoid this thing, why don't you just
(07:00):
take this course instead, right, and you have a new
flight plan after that? Exactly. You gotta be nimble up there,
you gotta be quick, and you have your hands on
the sticks, right. Isn't that what they call him sticks?
I think so. I'll bet they do call him sticks.
Can you see pilot pilots calling him there? Sure, ladies
and gentlemen, got my hands on the sticks. I've never
(07:22):
heard that. You haven't, not from a pilot to a passenger. Okay,
but I think that doesn't leave the cockpit. You know
what happens in the cockpit talk um. So the mountain turbulence,
that is uh pretty easy to predict because mountains are there,
and if a pilot has driven, driven, have flown past
(07:43):
the Rockies or the Andies or any big mountain range,
they probably already know what's to expect there and have
routed their plane in such a way where they're not
going to get the worst of it. They can also
tell by the clouds that are there. There's some called
lenticular clouds, which are lens shaped, but I think it
actually kind of traces the contour of a wave. But
in cloud form you can be like, well, I've gotta
(08:05):
stay out of there because there's breaking waves of wind
right there. Yeah. So yeah, there's things they can do visually.
The problem is is the clear air turbulence. I mean
they don't call it clear air, I exactly, and I
mean it really is like it can be really really rough,
not just because it comes out of nowhere, but because
(08:26):
the differences in speed between one spot and another so
pronounced that it can really jar and jostle you. Yeah,
for those The thing, and this is kind of cool.
The thing they count on the most, uh, is talking
to other pilots. There's a lot of planes up there,
and chances are if you're flying anywhere in the United States,
there's another plane on more or less your route just
(08:48):
a few minutes ahead of you, right, And so they
they're always in touch with one another. Uh, it's not
even you know, they share information. It's not like a
delta pilot won't be like, hey, the Southwest guys behind us,
but don't tell them what's so they're always warning each
other about what to expect, how bad it is, um,
(09:09):
whether or not you need to really alter your route
or maybe just park it at a certain altitude. Right.
And so when they get this info, they'll say, uh,
ladies and gentlemen, please put your seatbelts on, get out
of the bathroom. Uh. Flight attendants put them carts up.
I think it's how they put it. That's in pilot lingo.
And that's usually when some somebody gets up, it's like, oh,
(09:32):
I really need to go. That's the moment I'm like,
I have to go to the bathroom so bad. Yeah yeah, um.
But if you're not getting up, and even if they
aren't telling you to um to put your seatbelt on,
if you're just sitting in your seat, you should always
keep your seatbelt on, just because there is such thing
as clearer. Turbulent catches everybody by surprise, and then all
(09:52):
of a sudden you're like floating up against the ceiling,
which is bad enough for you, but you can also
come down another poor unsuspecting travelers too. It's like about
floating people who like smashing into the ceiling for a moment. Yeah. Um,
it's like people who don't wear the seatbelt in the
back seat. It's like, you're not just putting your own
life in danger when you cut it getting a head
(10:14):
on collision, you're flying forward past the people in the
front who did have their seatbelts on, and your feet
and your fists in your head are taking their heads
off with you. Yeah, you know what I mean. You
got to wear your seatbelt in the back seat. Check
so they get about if they're talking to other pilots
in the air, they get a five to ten minute warning.
(10:34):
If they're getting a warning from the ground, that's about
twenty minutes up to twenty minutes. So that's that's plenty
of time. That's why that's why it works so well.
That's why you don't get more severe cases of turbulence
because everyone's in contact at all times, making sure that
you don't feel the worst of it, which is great.
They also figured out that you can't put two planes
(10:55):
too close together because planes create weake and that creates turbulence,
and they you that out the hard way. Apparently planes
have crashed from following too close coming in for a landing.
Don't do it on the road either. No, certainly not,
although apparently it does save your gas mileage. Yeah, behind
(11:15):
like a semi or something. Yeah, I mean that's why
they do it in NASCAR, right, But it's not safe. No, don't,
don't do it. You're no NASCAR driver unless you are
a NASCAR driver listening to this, in which case you
do what you're doing. Well. Thanks for joining us on
short Stuff. We love you.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Mr. Chuck,
and there's Ms Jerry over there. That's Ms tu Succa.
This is, like I said, short stuff. Buckle up everyone. Yeah,
for the turbulent addition of short stuff. Have you ever
had a bad like really bad? No, not really bad? No,
(00:24):
Yeah I haven't either. You know, there's actually a classification
for that. It's not called really bad. It's called extreme
or severe. But there's three types of turbulence. There's light turbulence,
you know, it's kind of kind of shakes like your
drink a little bit. And I'm going on this again.
There's moderate, which is like your drink is now spilling
out of your cup. And then there's severe and that
(00:46):
is like the kind where people get hurt sometimes very
rarely die. But um I saw photos of a plane
ride from Santa Anna up to Seattle, I think, and
it was like a Delta flight and the drink cart
was on its side and like they have been serving
(01:07):
drinks and the thing the plane just hit turbulence, took
a two ft nose dive, and apparently one of the
flight attendants and the drink cart were on the ceiling
and it just came down. So it can get pretty bad,
but it's very very rare, it turns out. Yeah, So
if you haven't picked up on it, we're talking about
airplane turbulence and specifically when a pilot knows when they
(01:27):
come on there and say, you know, hold onto your
butts everyone, here we go in the next ten minutes.
I've always wondered, like, what the deal was, Well, now
we know. Now we know when we can just bother
every passenger next to us till the end of let
me you know how they realize, you know, when they
make this announcement. Yeah, if you really want to get
at somebody sleeping next to you on an airplane's attention,
(01:50):
don't just kind of elbow them, like just slowly increase
the pressure of your pointy elbow in the rib cage
until they wake up. That'll get them talking. Yeah, And regardless,
like you said, of how bad it gets, it's usually
not to that big of a deal. Um, as far
as planes go there, they're made to take it. I know.
Sometimes if you're sitting on the wing and looking out,
(02:11):
Oh yeah, you can be a little distressing seeing those
things almost flapping, But they're meant to move a little.
They're supposed to do that. Yeah, so don't worry. Uh,
the wing is not going to snap off most likely. Now,
remember when we talked about cars and how it seems
like they're made terribly today because they come apart, but
they're actually designed like that to make them like easier
to take a crash. The same thing with the plane
(02:33):
if they were just completely rigid and brittle, and the
wing might actually snap off. So it's supposed to flap
a little bit in turbulence. Yeah, And the other part
of that is injuries. Um, the f a A said
forty four injuries in two thousand sixteen due to turbulence
nine plus million people flying. That is not a lot
of injuries. Yeah, I think the most exceedingly rare, Like
(02:53):
there was thirteen and two thousand thirteen. Oddly, there was
seventeen in two thousand seventeen, and between ninth teen eighty
and two thousand eight there were only three deaths from turbulence.
So it is very very rare. And one of the
reasons it's not way worse and it's actually getting even
better is because pilots are able to predict where the
turbulence is coming. Because number one, they're trained to see
(03:17):
signs of it. But also there are a entire network
of people on planet Earth back down on the ground
who are working to let those pilots know what places
to avoid and why. Yeah, so when they when they
go to take off, there's a few types of turbulence
to look out for. Convective that is, you know, kind
of the standard thunderstorm turbulence that you might expect. Yeah,
(03:39):
Like when air on the Earth surface gets warm, it
rises and it can create clouds as it carries water
vapor up and cools, and the taller the cloud, the
more turbulent there is in there, that's right. Uh. Then
there's mountain wave of turbulence, and that's when air is
just literally cresting over the top of a mountain, uh,
and wave like you would see in the ocean. Yeah,
(04:01):
because it's all fluid. I mean air and water they're
both fluid, you know, so of course they would break
like that. You don't want to get your little plane
caught up in a breaking air wave, no, uh. And
then finally you have the clear air turbulence, and that's
the toughest to predict because it's not like you see
a big mountain range or lightning popping off in the foreground.
That is just air colliding with warm air and cold
(04:25):
air colliding with one another. Yeah, so it forms jet streams, right,
and those those that's that can be problematic because the
the difference in um, the direction that the winds moving in,
the speed it's moving in can really wreak havoc on
your plane. And when you're cruising through a patch like
that very quickly, all of those little bumps and jostles
(04:46):
and turns come together to make what we think of
as turbulence. That's right. So that is uh, what turbulence is.
Let's take a little break here and we're gonna talk
about how these pilots can avoid it. If you want
(05:11):
to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to
just chuck sew shoon. So before they even take off,
they have started avoiding turbulence. When they get their flight
plan together, they don't just say, you know, we're flying
(05:32):
from Atlanta to l A. So let's just you know,
take a left turn after takeoff and fly west until
we get to l A. Maybe you've been taken out. Yeah,
it's a very you know, uh, it's very planned out. Uh.
And although they can't predict every bit of turbulence, they
can certainly say, well, we know there's a mountain range
here and there is a thunderstorm going on here, so
(05:54):
we're gonna set our flight plan accordingly, right exactly, so
they start off on the right foot the UM. They
also have like little handy weather maps too, because storms
can develop even after you've already taken off that weren't predicted.
And they can also line up too, so you might
have to choose what storm you actually have to go
through if you have to write, and so they have
(06:17):
weather instrumentation that makes it real simple to choose. Like
a storm up ahead that's yellow says if you have
a green alternative, choose the green one. Ones that are
read it says. You're gonna have to course correct basically UM.
And when you course correct, you basically have to get
in touch with UM air traffic Control and say, hey,
(06:38):
I know we weren't planning on going up an extra
ten thou feet, but I need to fly over this
turbulence for a little while, and they'll say do it.
And you fly up, you go over the tribulence, you say,
can I come back down now? And They're like, we
we've been waiting for you to ask, buddy, come on
back down, and you go back down to your original
flight plan, or you may not, or they may say,
you know what, since you went this far out of
the way to avoid this thing, why don't you just
(07:00):
take this course instead, right, and you have a new
flight plan after that? Exactly. You gotta be nimble up there,
you gotta be quick, and you have your hands on
the sticks, right. Isn't that what they call him sticks?
I think so. I'll bet they do call him sticks.
Can you see pilot pilots calling him there? Sure, ladies
and gentlemen, got my hands on the sticks. I've never
(07:22):
heard that. You haven't, not from a pilot to a passenger. Okay,
but I think that doesn't leave the cockpit. You know
what happens in the cockpit talk um. So the mountain turbulence,
that is uh pretty easy to predict because mountains are there,
and if a pilot has driven, driven, have flown past
(07:43):
the Rockies or the Andies or any big mountain range,
they probably already know what's to expect there and have
routed their plane in such a way where they're not
going to get the worst of it. They can also
tell by the clouds that are there. There's some called
lenticular clouds, which are lens shaped, but I think it
actually kind of traces the contour of a wave. But
in cloud form you can be like, well, I've gotta
(08:05):
stay out of there because there's breaking waves of wind
right there. Yeah. So yeah, there's things they can do visually.
The problem is is the clear air turbulence. I mean
they don't call it clear air, I exactly, and I
mean it really is like it can be really really rough,
not just because it comes out of nowhere, but because
(08:26):
the differences in speed between one spot and another so
pronounced that it can really jar and jostle you. Yeah,
for those The thing, and this is kind of cool.
The thing they count on the most, uh, is talking
to other pilots. There's a lot of planes up there,
and chances are if you're flying anywhere in the United States,
there's another plane on more or less your route just
(08:48):
a few minutes ahead of you, right, And so they
they're always in touch with one another. Uh, it's not
even you know, they share information. It's not like a
delta pilot won't be like, hey, the Southwest guys behind us,
but don't tell them what's so they're always warning each
other about what to expect, how bad it is, um,
(09:09):
whether or not you need to really alter your route
or maybe just park it at a certain altitude. Right.
And so when they get this info, they'll say, uh,
ladies and gentlemen, please put your seatbelts on, get out
of the bathroom. Uh. Flight attendants put them carts up.
I think it's how they put it. That's in pilot lingo.
And that's usually when some somebody gets up, it's like, oh,
(09:32):
I really need to go. That's the moment I'm like,
I have to go to the bathroom so bad. Yeah yeah, um.
But if you're not getting up, and even if they
aren't telling you to um to put your seatbelt on,
if you're just sitting in your seat, you should always
keep your seatbelt on, just because there is such thing
as clearer. Turbulent catches everybody by surprise, and then all
(09:52):
of a sudden you're like floating up against the ceiling,
which is bad enough for you, but you can also
come down another poor unsuspecting travelers too. It's like about
floating people who like smashing into the ceiling for a moment. Yeah. Um,
it's like people who don't wear the seatbelt in the
back seat. It's like, you're not just putting your own
life in danger when you cut it getting a head
(10:14):
on collision, you're flying forward past the people in the
front who did have their seatbelts on, and your feet
and your fists in your head are taking their heads
off with you. Yeah, you know what I mean. You
got to wear your seatbelt in the back seat. Check
so they get about if they're talking to other pilots
in the air, they get a five to ten minute warning.
(10:34):
If they're getting a warning from the ground, that's about
twenty minutes up to twenty minutes. So that's that's plenty
of time. That's why that's why it works so well.
That's why you don't get more severe cases of turbulence
because everyone's in contact at all times, making sure that
you don't feel the worst of it, which is great.
They also figured out that you can't put two planes
(10:55):
too close together because planes create weake and that creates turbulence,
and they you that out the hard way. Apparently planes
have crashed from following too close coming in for a landing.
Don't do it on the road either. No, certainly not,
although apparently it does save your gas mileage. Yeah, behind
(11:15):
like a semi or something. Yeah, I mean that's why
they do it in NASCAR, right, But it's not safe. No, don't,
don't do it. You're no NASCAR driver unless you are
a NASCAR driver listening to this, in which case you
do what you're doing. Well. Thanks for joining us on
short Stuff. We love you.
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