> "So I started bracing for what was happening, and very suddenly there was a very dramatic drop so everyone seated and not wearing seatbelt was launched immediately into the ceiling," 28-year-old student Dzafran Azmir said.
> "Some people hit their heads on the baggage cabins overhead and dented it, they hit the places where lights and masks are and broke straight through it."
That's why I try to keep my seatbelt on at all times, ever since I went through some rough turbulences on my way to Dubai (layover)
I recently flew ANA and they advise all passengers to keep their seatbelts on at all times when seated. It seems like simple advice. I do the same thing when I'm driving. I don't find it uncomfortable in the slightest, even sleeping. Maybe others have a different experience, but turbulence isn't that rare. I've had serious turbulence on many flights. Probably the worst was final approach / landing in Frankfurt with perfectly blue skies. The atmosphere does weird things.
Loose seatbelts are probably fine. That’s what I do. Presumably that keeps me from getting launched into the ceiling. A lap belt is a compromise anyway. Aircraft crew use more as do car drivers for that matter.
Right but what's the point? If the belt is on very loose, you give your body a chance to gain momentum, which will be redirected when the seat belt catches you, which would lead to serious injury.
The belt doesn't need to be on tight, but it should be relatively snug.
It's just one of those things that is trivial to do, with a very, very low probability to save you from injury, but costs nothing, so why not...
I'm going by the levels of "loose" I regularly see on flights. I regularly see seat belts buckled, effectively fully slacked. It's not everyone, but probably 5%.
You won't gain additional momentum from a loose belt. But a loose belt may give your body the chance to slip out. The impulse you feel from a tight belt will be no less than the impulse you feel from a loose one.
Impulse is constant, its the force that is transferred to your body. This is constant whether or not a belt is worn.
A belt simply takes that force and redistributes it into the seat frame, if the belt is not worn the force is not redistributed by the belt but rather by your head into the overhead bin
The impact is a matter of energy, not of force- if the force applies for more than an instant, you keep accelerating before hitting the ceiling and the energy of the impact will be proportional to the square of your speed. If the belt is tight, you stop at a lower speed (relative to the aircraft) and the energy of the impact (with the belt, in this case) is lower.
It's like debt. If I'm standing on the ground, I'm constantly "making payments" to the ground. If I jump off a cliff, then while I am falling, I stop making payments, so when I next contact the ground, accumulated debt suddenly must be paid.
More precisely, while I am falling, my velocity and consequently my momentum relative to the Earth steadily increases, which is analogous to debt because I will eventually need to restore the situation in which my momentum relative to the Earth is zero (because that is how people live their lives: at rest relative to the surface of the Earth rather than for example in orbit).
In the same way, the passenger in the airplane must eventually go back to being at rest relative to the airplane, but if the seat belt is very loose, "debt" (momentum relative to the airliner) can be accumulated before all the slack has been taken out of the seat belt.
Yes, the total amount of impulse (change in momentum caused by the environment's pushing on the person) integrated over time is the same regardless of how tight the seat belt is, but it matters whether that impulse is spread out over time or comes in one big jolt.
That doesn't make sense. Force is not accumulated by people standing on the ground, so your later analogy does not work at all
The ground opposes the force produced by gravity, there is no accumulation of anything. Gravity accelerates mass when it is pulling it in motion unless there is an equal and opposite force which is the normal force exerted by the ground (or airplane)
This behavior is reflected in car attitudes too. Many Japanese drive with a detached seatbelt.
Not even the presence of children changes this calculus.
Most Dutch people don’t wear a helmet when riding a bicycle. As e-bikes are becoming more popular, some older people are opting to wear a helmet since the speed is higher, but many still don’t.
It’s not uncommon to see a parent riding around with a kid attached to the bike and neither are wearing a helmet.
I think it is kind of a cultural thing as well as convenience. If you ride a bike to the station to catch a train, then you might need storage or to carry it with you.
Pricesely this, yes. And for the kids, an average trip to school takes like 5-10 minutes, hassling with three helmets (mine and of two kids) takes almost as long. And then I have to carry three helmets if I want to drop by to the supermarket after getting them to school.
The bicycle seats for kids are designed in such a way that the only real danger of a head being hit is in the frontal collision, or in a really forceful side one. The design of Dutch streets makes the chance of either happening small enough that the helmets are widely seen as not worth it.
I thought that Dutch parents put small kids on the front of their bicycle to absorb the blunt of impacts. Then you dispose of the small child and make another one.
Also it's just not really a big danger. There's no epidemic of brain injury due to this.
Part of the reason is that because bike usage is so common and the infrastructure is very separate (bike lanes everywhere, no mixed traffic on eg roundabouts), and bikes almost always have right of way and are not to blame in an accident, that drivers are very aware of them. I noticed in countries like Ireland with much less bikes that bike lanes sometimes just end in the middle of a high speed roundabout. And most drivers there have no clue which is in part because until 10 years ago you could just buy a driver's license at the post office. It was a "learner's permit" but it was normal practice to just go and drive.
So yeah in Ireland I wouldn't even ride a bike with a helmet. In Holland I'm much safer even without one.
I don't remember the "Not Just Bikes" YouTube video, but he specifically discusses the relatively low rates of bicycle helmet wearing, especially amoungst urban riders. I agree with you: When there are serious bike injuries, it is usually due to a car or truck in mixed space. When only bikes riding less than 25km/h, the injuries are pretty minor.
Actually that seems very Japanese in a weird way - they might be trusting themselves and everyone else to follow rules precisely, thus avoiding all the accidents and obviating the need for seatbelts.
Is driving actually kind of easy in Japan for this reason? I’ve never had a car while there. It’s wild how different Japan and China are despite being neighbors. I can’t think of a European neighbor pair that is so different.
One is an island nation that's been fairly open, the other had waves of isolationism, famines, and only recently opened up their markets in the late 80s. Private car ownership was not on the table until probably 25 years ago.
But to play your game, Switzerland and Italy, especially southern Italy, are very different.
Your counterexample is not even close to being accurate. Italy and Switzerland have much more in common than China and Japan. Italian is even one of the official languages of Switzerland. Switzerland and Italy are both essentially federations of distinct provinces. Both are recognizably Western European. China and Japan are worlds apart, as are China and India.
My main point was that there's plenty of reasons for China and Japan to be different, especially when it comes to driving norms. Are you surprised as the other poster was about these differences between China and Japan?
And going back to the original intent: would you say driving in Zurich and driving in Naples are two distinct experiences?
I can: Germany and (European) Russia. They are about the same distance as Tokyo to Shanghai. They have wildly different driving cultures! Also, China is the size of a continent. Did you drive in all the different regions? I doubt it. Do what region are you extrapolating from?
I've just browsed some old safety videos on YouTube, and in the U.S. this recommendation seems to have appeared in the early 90s (e.g. Northwest 1993 https://youtu.be/rUQtG0a_7d0?t=127), while being absent in the late 80s (e.g. Pan Am 1988 https://youtu.be/m3zj-oUm7vc?t=33).
I've been flying for a long time. It's only in the last decade that I've noticed the specific language of "keep your seatbelt fastened even if the light turns off". It's always been a "soft" suggestion, but it's becoming stronger, and repeated. The ANA flight crew in particular were quite adamant about it.
This may just be me becoming more aware of it, but, if so, I'm also becoming more aware of more passengers actually heeding the advice. I remember, not that long ago, most people removing their seatbelts as soon as the light went out. Not so common now.
> It's only in the last decade that I've noticed the specific language of "keep your seatbelt fastened even if the light turns off".
It makes you wonder why they ever even turn off the seatbelt light. Just keep it on the whole time, just like the equally anachronistic no-smoking light.
I feel like the light is just there to mollify the older generations who didn't grow up with mandatory seat belts wearing in cars, fought those laws loudly, and are still bitter that the government makes them take a sensible safety precaution. Are there enough of those people still flying that it makes sense to keep that light in use?
There are times when the pilots are expecting turbulence, when they are notified by ATC or other planes ahead of them. During that time, the light means passengers shouldn't use the lavatories.
During take-off and landing, it is. At cruise altitude, it really does mean "the pilots are expecting turbulence and suggest you stay seated", at least in my experience.
Of course they don't always get it right both ways: Sometimes reports of turbulence ahead turn out to be false positives, and at other times, strong turbulence can happen without any warning.
I've been on smoothe flights where the sign was kept on practically the whole time. Unfortunately I suspect some pilots forget about it, and I have observed that the public have gotten used to getting up to use the bathroom even when the sign is on (excluding takeoff and landing). I haven't flown enough to notice a pattern with specific routes or airlines.
That's a good point! They even have a design for that on the bathrooms already (and now I wonder if that's always been the case, or if there was a time when people were frantically searching for the seatbelts there when the chime came on :)
I’ve flown internationally for a decade and it was only around 2018-20 I noticed most airlines reminding you to keep your seat belt fastened. Before that it seemed like the exception, not the rule.
Yup... I still don't understand why people decide to not put on their seatbelt while being seated. It's not like you have a lot more freedom of movement without the seatbelt? And it might just save your life in events like this one.
> So it's a bit like "why don't people wear a welding mask while cooking?"
Your kitchen does not have staff telling you to make sure you are wearing a welding mask. It may also lack appropriate indicator lamps that tell you when it is a good time to wear your welding mask. It is also not standard practice in all kitchens.
It’s actually not like airplane seatbelts at all, where they are ubiquitous and the risks of not wearing them are fairly well-documented.
People are constantly bombarded with seemingly unnecessary warnings. I frequently assume that these warnings are to insulate a company from legal trouble and not really to protect me. This might be an American perspective.
Warning fatigue is a real concern, and requiring people to watch videos on the internet should not be a prerequisite for adequate safety.
I've definitely noticed a proliferation of warning notices and signs in the US (and I don't just mean the Californian chemical hazard warnings in the most bizarre/unavoidable locations like a jet bridge), with the really important ones usually reiterated by a human standing next to them, continuously shouting the same instruction, apparently because people don't seem to take them seriously otherwise.
It’s always been an American impulse to resist authority and think for yourself. That is generally admirable. Then at some point the “think for yourself” part got tossed out, and people disobey instructions for the sake of it.
It’s not that hard to follow instructions. There aren’t that many, and almost all flights have the exact same ones. If you don’t want to learn about getting tossed around like a rag doll at 40k feet that’s fine, just do what the crew tells you to do and you’ll be ok.
It's not "known nonsense", but not for the reason you think. There's a small risk of your phone connecting to some random carrier located in whatever country you're currently flying over. For some smaller / third-world countries, this can be quite expensive, cents-per-megabyte isn't unheard of.
Every time this is brought up people come out of the woodworks with post-hoc rationale for this rule that has no basis in historical fact. This comment is good example.
Why would the FAA and other aviation regulatory agencies care about your phone bill?
I completely agree on GPs statement being absurd post-hoc rationale, but interestingly, this rule is actually coming from the FCC, not the FAA [1], with the FAA only indicating support for it [2].
The motivation is supposedly cellphones at high altitudes interfering with far-away cell towers that are reusing the same frequency at a distance that would normally make interference very unlikely, given the radio horizon and everything.
I highly doubt that that would still be an issue modern networks couldn't handle (also given that most other countries don't have a corresponding law on their books, as far as I know), yet here we are.
It's not the reason the rule was implemented, it's not something the FAA cares about, but this doesn't change the fact that it's still a good idea in some cases, rule or no rule.
By that logic, many more things ought to be declared illegal by completely unrelated regulatory bodies. It would be a bit like the FDA banning gambling, or the SEC reinstating prohibition.
It may still be a good idea because of battery but basically no one cares. Contra early days of smartphones when there near altercations with passengers responding to one last email after the doors closed.
Something interesting I’ve seen on my recent domestic United flight, which I don’t think I’ve seen before.
While the flight safety video was being played, a male flight attendant was walking through the cabin and actively telling people with headphones on (connected to their own device), to take them off and listen to the safety video. It wasn’t a recommendation though, he would wait until the person complied and would then continue down the aisle.
I didn’t have any headphones on. At first it felt a little bit overboard, but with events like this turbulence happening, I can see the need for it.
> Your kitchen does not have staff telling you to make sure you are wearing a welding mask.
The advice to wear your seat belt throughout the flight are hardly clear and emphatic. They often make it sound like something they have to say to cover their asses. There's certainly no clear comms around the risk of death and serious injury.
I have no idea in this case whether the indicators went on in time but I obviously wasn't arguing in favour of ignoring those.
> the risks of not wearing them are fairly well-documented.
Where? Where would I have seen this documentation? I'm 53 and I have no recollection of stumbling across it.
(also - please reconsider your tone next time. It feels like you're trying to get me riled up)
Yes, they say it to cover their asses -- for the very very rare occasion when an unbelted passenger ends up stuffed into the overhead lighting panel or carry-on baggage compartments. :)
Seat belts in cars also contain several CYA-grade chimes and buzzers. The owner manual may mention risk of injury or death. Likely an airline's contract of carriage contains the same. I suspect both are read as often and as eagerly by their users.
I think the multiple "off tone" messages you're getting are in response to your use of ignorance as a defense for ignoring airplane crew instructions.
> [..] in response to your use of ignorance as a defense for ignoring airplane crew instructions.
Unless I come from an alternate universe - most people wear their seatbelt during take-off and landing and when the seatbelt light comes on.
I wear mine through most of the flight but I only started doing this fairly recently because I learned more about turbulence.
I'm not defending ignorance at all. I'm simply describing how poorly the risks are communicated and the reality that most people I've observed don't wear seatbelts for the entire duration of a flight unless the warning light comes on.
If they spent the time to describe all of the rare-yet-possible ways a person could die on an airliner, the thing would never leave the gate.
At some level, take their mandated-by-regulations word for it? -- these regs are written in blood, and they say to buckle your belt, not only when the sign is lighted, but also any time when seated at your seat.
Boeing has done a good job of reminding us of some non-turbulence reasons to buckle up. You might also get sucked out of an unsecured exit door plug on a 737. :) I haven't heard that one mentioned in a safety brief yet.
In the pilot circles I frequent, the joke about seatbelts is that it helps accident investigators more easily count the deceased among the wreckage. So there's some YOLO fuel for your next trip. This was a freak occurrence. It's sad and it sucks. The injuries to passengers were likely preventable -- less so the cabin crew. New word is that the fatality was a cardiac event -- no belt buckle helps anyone there.
People who follow all safety instructions endure fewer light injuries, severe injuries and fatalities. Pilots who joke about seatbelts are just an example of professionals being hilariously wrong (or sardonic) about a topic adjacent to their expertise. Or they were just joking about their usefullness in an uncontrolled crash landing, which is extremely rare.
In this case, a seat belt would have likely saved the person - heavily injuring yourself is quite traumatic (tautologically) which increases the risk of cardiac events. In any case, injuries due to turbulence are extremely common as far as injuries in airliners go.
Nearly every flight they state that you should keep your seatbelt buckled at all times. If someone decides that they don't need to do that, it is because of their willful ignorance, sorry.
I think maybe you come from an alternate universe. It’s been standard procedure for at least 3 decades to wear your seatbelt, even if loosely, all the time you’re on a plane, apart from when going to the loo or otherwise moving around.
I mean, I don’t really know how to say it without sounding like a git. This is simply what you do. What “everyone” does, for a loose definition of everyone. The “everyone” that wears seatbelts in a car, for example.
Genuine question: you know you should wear seatbelts if traveling in the rear seats of a car as well, yes ?
> The advice to wear your seat belt throughout the flight are hardly clear and emphatic. They often make it sound like something they have to say to cover their asses. There's certainly no clear comms around the risk of death and serious injury.
I can't remember the last time I was on a plane where they didn't recommend keeping a seatbelt on at all times.
It’s not like the pilots can see a giant messy region of air up ahead. Sometimes they’ll know the flight overall will be rough and can warn you but generally most times they tell you to fasten your seat belts some turbulence has already happened.
A plane the other day dove suddenly out of nowhere. Less recently a door plug blew off a plane and nobody was sucked out thanks to seatbelts. Before that, a flight departing Hawaii fell a few hundred feet without warning shortly after takeoff. These all happened very publicly and with widespread media coverage.
Frankly, if you fly a few times a year and never wear your belt you’ll probably be fine. But it takes zero effort and doesn’t need to be strapped particularly tight to be effective. There’s essentially zero reason not to wear it and it can save your life.
Sometimes you just have to use a little of your own intelligence.
I agree with this. The seatbelt light is as anachronistic as the no-smoking light. They should just keep it on at all times. People obviously are still incorrectly interpreting "seatbelt light off" as "I should take my seatbelt off now."
Do you fly over the tropics? To me it's not so uncommon to experience heavier turbulence when crossing the equator to the tropic of Capricorn, haven't experienced turbulence bad enough to see people pushed straight through the cover of the oxygen masks but I've been in a couple of flights where I experienced big drops in a split second, thankfully never seen anyone badly injured just some poor soggy bastard that was thrown around in the bathroom and people hitting their heads on the overhead bins.
I just always wear my seatbelt per the flight attendants' instructions, "keep your seatbelts fastened while seated" is a recommendation in every flight I've ever taken in my life.
When you're cooking, you're not thousands of feet in the air in tight quarters traveling hundreds of miles per hour through the atmosphere in a however many ton vessel filled with flammable fuel.
Umm, I also found it to be a remarkably bad analogy.
More accurate would be something like:
"The chef instructor telks us every time we cook this flaming oil dish that can flame over unpredictably at any time so we should wear the welding helmet whenever possible. And I didn't bother and found it surprising."
Seriously, they tell us EVERY TIME ti wear seat belts at all times when seated. They don't do it just to annoy, confuse, or mislead the passengers. The only surprising thing to me is that such deaths are not more frequent. Despite efforts to predict turbulence, the forces at play when flying 600mph are insane in relation to the human body.
We need to respect that, because physics really DGAF about our opinions.
What's not to understand about this? Airplanes are just super f'in safe and most people just think that nothing will ever happen to them, because rarely anything happens. Things do happen, but walking around the plane is cooler
I think that was humour, but I could see someone having multiple heart attacks perhaps- and being technically dead, coming back with … encouragement given by CPR, and then sadly dying from a second heart attack/stroke/stoved-in-ribs…
Same in buses, every now and then you have deadly accidents, most deaths are due to people not using the belts and getting slammed around. It's one of the most easily avoidable death
Look at that one for example, the few people who had belt will most likely be fine, on the other hand people without belts got thrown around like ragdolls and many died: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldfgEJpIgKM&rco=1
In East Asia bus systems are much better than they are in most other countries. Buses travel everywhere and if they enter highways they usually have seatbelts. But people still just avoid them because there are a lot of "don't follow safety" social hivemind ideas.
I think it's something to do with being rebellious. Of course at work they do what they're told while building wealth for someone else. But something that really only benefits them... Nah. I've run into a lot of people like this, sadly.
It's also so if a window fails you don't get sucked all the way out (although you can still be killed if you're sucked partially out, as happened on a Southwest Airlines flight to an unfortunate passenger.)
I don't understand this weird line of thinking. Don't do positive X because some people might respond to it in a weird way and do neutral Y.
Cattling statistics like this is silly.
If you showed fat people images of obesity and said that they'd be healthier if they lost their weight, you would also cattle the statistics and look at how many fat people decided to suicide versus how many took the advice (or didn't)? What a dumb way to construct advice.
I think it should be required industry-wide. If you are seated, seatbelts must be worn and no loitering standing up. It is the case in most countries seatbelts must be worn while terrestrial vehicles are in motion.
I recall a very specific emirates turbulence experience which was hours of relatively mild medium bumps over Iran. The bumps weren’t as notable as much as the duration was. Seatbelts always for me too!
Tragic, horrid and going to make a lot of nervous flyers more nervous.
I've been through some pretty heavy turbulence in my time, but thankfully nothing this severe. I've been through enough though to know that a lot of people don't take it very seriously. I've been on flights with screaming passengers, and _very_ quiet British Marines, both in reaction to some pretty nasty air, and I'm always surprised that turbulence surprises people. It's part of flying.
There's a reason why you're advised to keep your seatbelt fastened when seated. I simply don't understand some cabins that have cocktail bars in them - are you absolutely crazy? Air pockets are horrific, and there is nothing pilots can do to avoid unexpected ones. One minute you can be sipping your vodka martini, the next you can be thrown around to the point you're hitting the ceiling and then the floor within a couple of seconds of each other, and hard, hard enough to kill you.
Even on transatlantic flights (LHR to SFO or LAX is normal for me), I'm only getting out of my seat if I absolutely 100% have to go to the bathroom, and then I'm going to reduce time not buckled in to absolute minimum.
> I simply don't understand some cabins that have cocktail bars in them - are you absolutely crazy? Air pockets are horrific, and there is nothing pilots can do to avoid unexpected ones.
The answer is that you're far more likely to choke on an olive at the bar than die due to turbulence.
A great tip I heard long ago for nervous flyers - whenever their is turbulence, look at the flight staff. If they're going about business as usual and look otherwise relaxed, which is almost always the case, you've got nothing to worry about. Consider them turbulence experts, and if the experts aren't concerned you don't need to be either.
They're just putting on their seatbelts. They may not even have a choice if the pilot tells them to, just like during takeoff and landing. It may also help to remember that flight attendants are, first and foremost, safety personnel. We think of them as sky waiters, but all of their training is for safety.
This tip fails when the flight crew starts to look worried/concerned. But, I guess at that point, you have reason to be nervous. This happened during severe turbulence to me once, but it had the effect of making me a calmer flyer because it really was pretty bad (no one flew into the ceiling but they'd already made sure everyone had seatbelts fastened) and I ended up being fine.
When I walk in a city I don't spend my time constantly scanning the sky and every building around me for a potential falling object. Or research the structural history of every bridge I drive over then spend hours avoiding certain ones. Or a hundred other rare things that do kill people but statistically not often. Everyone dies one day and everyone has a single life. I don't see the point of spending that one life in constant fear of the end that cannot be avoided anyways without even meaningfully changing the timeline of that end.
Why do you perceive wearing a seatbelt on a flight and minimising time out of a seat as such a high cost/inconvenience? I hear this line of thought a lot, particularly nowadays around masking to avoid COVID, and I’m always intrigued by this idea that avoiding this tiny act that barely impacts you is somehow sticking a big middle finger up to fear
Because there's millions of those tiny acts and I doubt you've read the risk analysis of each one to decide which fifty thousand to follow. But if you actually do consider them rationally and act on them then cool. Most people who say what you do however don't but rather act based on an irrational perception of risks usually due to things like media attention or misclassifying lack of control as risk.
I've met people who actually and rationally consider all the potential risks and I respect them. It's also an exhausting life to lead from my observation.
To be honest, time out of seat is a deliberate choice. My legs are long, and the seats are tiny!
I do wear a seatbelt when in seat, though more out of fear than expectation something like that will ever happen. It just seems like an incredibly stupid way to die, and mitigating it costs me nothing.
> particularly nowadays around masking to avoid COVID
Ah ok, as I suspected a covid authoritarian that’s deluded and ruthlessly mocking ANY recognition of cost in the cost-benefit analysis of safety measures, meanwhile overestimating the benefit all together.
nah it's this covid authoritarianism that blows risks out of proportion and usually with scant evidence and does it in a categorical way that ignores impacts which often have WORSE harms than the thing they're trying to protect against
in the flight case, it could very well be that if you were able to count, there's more harm from DVT from sitting in a seat all flight, versus getting up to walk around regularly and potentially being hurt by turbulence
just a cursory search shows ~300 serious injuries in 30 years tracked by the FAA
Sure, but if someone told me they were getting up for a walk on a flight because they didn’t want to get DVT, I wouldn’t go on a tirade about how their life was ruled by fear. That’s what my original comment was intending to address.
but the point is that walking around a plane is relatively safe, and severe turbulence is rare, so much so that you'd probably better off walking around fairly regularly if only due to less DVT risk
There are reasonable measures those around you can take to ensure that falling objects don't crash into you from the sky, or that the bridge you're on does not collapse as you're driving over it. The risk is mitigated by reducing likelihood and impact.
There is nothing a pilot can do to avoid an air pocket. There is little mitigation possible.
But then it's not about safety. It's about your need to feel in control of the situation even if the control is an illusion. That is fair in a way but saying it's a safety thing or that people are crazy for not needing to feel in control all the time isn't fair. Or even calling them crazy for not doing the same ultimately meaningless actions as you to create an illusion of control for themselves
So let's say the media started a campaign promoting wearing a helmet all the time. The anti-helmet people would be painted as reckless, feckless, and generally deplorable. All the celebrities would endorse wearing a helmet at all times. There would be New York Times editorials about "those people".
Questions:
Is this still about risk mitigation? If yes, are you at risk now? Why don't you wear your bike helmet at work all day? (never know when a ceiling tile could fall down)
Would your opinion change following this hypothetical media blitz? Would you hop on the bandwagon and decry the irresponsibility of the anti-helmet folks?
If you think about this for a second before hitting that downwards pointing triangle, does this dumb example mean that it's actually more about what's socially acceptable than actual safety? Why would you feel dumb wearing a helmet all day now, and dumb for not wearing it in that world?
A smart, independently minded person, would do the following risk analysis:
- Planes fly through the atmosphere in varying conditions.
- The conditions that lead to uncomfortable or dangerous turbulence are not at all uncommon.
- These conditions are unpredictable and have little warning.
- Wearing a seatbelt is a very minor inconvenience, and will protect me from the worst of the harms that can come from common turbulence.
- I will wear a seatbelt.
This doesn't seem complex.
The argument about bike helmets, although nuanced, should have nothing to do with celebrities wearing them or not.
> - These conditions are unpredictable and have little warning
Not true at all. The vast vast majority of turbulence incidents are very well predictable. It's not 1930 anymore.
> - The conditions that lead to uncomfortable or dangerous turbulence are not at all uncommon.
Except your flawed logic in the previous point flows to this point. The question isn't turbulence but unpredictable severe turbulence which is much rarer. About 1 per million flights I think which is far from common.
> A smart, independently minded person, would do the following risk analysis:
Given the flaws in the risks analysis I find this sentence hilarious.
"The vast vast majority of turbulence incidents are very well predictable."
On the large scale, yes, on the scale that causes a plane to drop a meter at very short notice, no they aren't. If they were, I wouldn't have been in planes that dropped a meter without any warning. Your "1 per million flights" is probably based on statistics relating to reported injury (correct me if I'm wrong). Those statistics would be skewed by many factors, not least people wearing seatbelts.
I've flown probably around a few hundred times. I've experienced uncomfortable (spilt drinks, rollercoaster feelings) probably about ten times. I've had actual dangerous turbulence (both times, as you say, with warning) twice. Once into Frankfurt, once into Singapore.
On a couple of flights the turbulence warning from the flight crew has come through after the initial experience of turbulence.
I'm not saying we're not good at detecting it, and I'm not saying it's super common, but your one in a million number is wishful thinking.
By the way, I actually love flying, and I still regard it as an incredibly safe way to travel, but wearing a seatbelt is still a good idea.
They do. I've flown many (more than 100x in some years) and I can't count how many times that pilot / co-pilot has announced upcoming turbulence and turned on the seat beat light.
The chance of an airplane hitting major turbulence unexpectedly, while pretty small, are much higher than the chance of some random debris falling from a building while you are passing by. Ultimately it's all weighing the inconvenience against the possible safety improvement: when you are sitting in your seat in a plane, the seatbelt is a very minor inconvenience. Wearing a helmet all the time is a much bigger inconvenience, with a much smaller benefit.
We DO recommend that individuals with high risk of injuring themselves wear helmets. People have varying levels of risk tolerance before they take steps to mitigate them; I'm sure some people choose to wear helmets because they estimate the risk of falling to be too high. In your hypothetical, I would probably not care, because to I and to most people the risk of falling at any given moment isn't high enough to warrant mitigating it. On an airplane, your risk of encountering turbulence is markedly high, enough so that it is worth mitigating. If you disagree then feel free to take your belt off, but don't complain if you die a very avoidable death. (Not that you could at that point.)
Well, and in fact, helmet wearing at least in the US has become normalized in situations where no one other than competing athletes wore helmets for things like skiing or casual biking a few decades ago. Today you stand out by not doing so. Heck. Professional hockey players didn’t use to wear helmets.
yes, your example is still about risk mitigation, but it's also a not-so-effective slippery slope argument likely motivated by a contrarian anti-masking stance. the reason there is no social pressure to helmet at all times is that we generally agree as a society that the inconvenience is not worth the minimal risk reduction.
this risk calculation is messy of course, as we all have different tolerances for inconvenience and risk, and we also have different responses to individual vs. collective risks.
It's not "constant fear" to just leave the seatbelt buckled. It literally requires less thought and effort to just leave it buckled, because you'll inevitably be re-buckling it when the plane encounters turbulence or lands.
Using PPE is not about living in fear, it's about taking appropriate precautions.
Did you read what OP wrote? It's not mostly about wearing your seatbelt when seated but mostly about never ever ever leaving your seat. That's the constant fear part.
We are all playing a giant game with no real winners called "Don't Die". Few play it actively, most just try to avoid too much pain before they reach the end, and others play it a bit like Russian Roulette.
> When I walk in a city I don't spend my time constantly scanning the sky and every building around me for a potential falling object. Or research the structural history of every bridge I drive over then spend hours avoiding certain ones.
Of course not, because all of those scenarios are extremely high effort for low reward.
Wearing a seatbelt on an airplane is very low effort and takes a few seconds at most.
Your examples are in no way comparable to putting on a seatbelt.
This is the type of fallacious thinking that gets people in trouble: Instead of discussing the issue at hand, they try to substitute a ridiculous, exaggerated alternative scenario and argue against that instead.
You don't have to look very deep to see why your example scenarios, which take enormous amounts of time and effort, are pure strawman arguments in the context of a simple discussion about seatbelts.
There's a second fallacy wherein people try to argue an "all or nothing" perspective: They list out exaggerated things that they can't/won't do (like looking in the sky all the time) and then try to make the claim that because they can't do all of those exaggerated things, they shouldn't be expected to do any safety-related thing. It's another fallacious argument tactic.
Agree. Has anyone died at Emirates A380 bar or Qatar minibar? Nope. I'll take my chances just as I do in thousands of scenarios a day that I just dont care to register.. This seems like a guy that when pair programming on someone else's keyboard uses gloves - we've all met them...
If you don't understand risk mitigation, or think it's someone else's job - even when, in the case of turbulence the professionals are telling you there is absolutely nothing they can do about it - then eventually you're just going to end up getting injured or killed by something that could be avoided.
Yes, death by turbulence is rare, but there are dozens of serious injuries a year caused by turbulence in US air space alone. Hundreds a year, globally. We're not talking about a small graze or cut, we're talking head injuries, broken bones, life changing injuries. Costs US airlines half a billion dollars a year dealing with it in terms of payouts and maintenance costs. Why you think that doesn't apply to you is a strange take to me, but you do you.
Accepting risk and believing it doesn’t apply to you are two vastly different things. I take it you don’t fly? How about driving? There is assumedly some line you draw for acceptable vs unacceptable risk
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here or what you’re suggesting we should do
It’s a cost-benefit relationship. Since wearing a seatbelt is such a minor inconvenience (you’re already sitting in that seat), it’s an obvious thing to do even though the risk is exceedingly rare.
In a hypothetical case where a seatbelt cost an extra $100 to use, then the cost would probably not be worth the benefit.
Use a seatbelt most of the time in a plane is his suggestion, which really isn't hidden. I for one take the suggestion and will do so, because there is no inconvience, but the OP clearly stated that you're supposed make your own decisions.
I wonder whether on average it's less risky on transatlantic flights to spend as much time out of your seat going to the bathroom, standing around, and stretching as possible vs. as much time buckled in as possible.
My guess is lethal turbulence is so rare, and things like deep-vein thrombosis are so common compare to that rarity, that it's not even close.
>There's a reason why you're advised to keep your seatbelt fastened when seated. I simply don't understand some cabins that have cocktail bars in them - are you absolutely crazy?
No, just not pusillanimous about it, given the odds.
There are a bunch of things airlines could do. Eliminate drink & food/snack service. Strap in 3 point harness for the whole trip and pee in a bottle if you must.
I suspect those would be… unpopular. At least some airlines banned hardcover books during takeoff and landing for a time.
Case in point, make self driving cars cheap enough (under USD 20k new for a decent electric car with self driving) and I'll gladly support a complete ban on humans driving on public roads if that means the self driving cars can coordinate and drive better.
If you're making such a major change to the infrastructure, replace the roads with train tracks, and the cars with electric trains. It'll be cheaper and safer.
Cars that can only be driven by computers in controlled conditions defeat most of the point of having cars (i.e., mobility for people unable to use public transport).
The point of cars is to provide mobility for the disabled?I would guess we would have a lot less cars around if that were the case, at least in the city (no idea how it is in the US, I heard you can’t even walk there in some places so )
> The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference. Barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets. Or they can be caused by people's attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people can't do certain things.
in areas without usable public transport, everyone has this "disability". Individual action can't make public transport magically appear: only policy changes can do that. (Or anarchically setting up your own public transport, I suppose, but that'll probably get you arrested in America.)
You keep using this term "toxic masculinity". I don't think it means what you think it means.
Or perhaps you also think only men are brave enough to go to airplane bars (or to untie their belt or stand from their seat during a flight even when it's not "absolutely necessary"?)
Per DuckDuckGo, the 2nd definition of “pusillanimous” in the American Heritage Dictionary is:
> Destitute of a manly or courageous strength and firmness of mind; of weak spirit; mean-spirited; spiritless; cowardly; -- said of persons,
“Destitute of a manly spirit” implies that there is such a thing as a manly spirit one can be more or less possessed of… that falls well and truly under the scope of the meaning of toxic masculinity.
And perhaps you, for some reason, think that women aren’t perfectly able to engage in toxic masculinity?
Either way, I only use the term where and when appropriate.
You should move around pretty often to reduce the risk of blood clots. It's probably a better risk trade-off than trying to stay seated (and buckled-up) at all times besides going to the bathroom.
This, I always have my seat belt fastened unless I really don’t need to be in my seat. On very long flights I will get up for a few minutes each hour but once I’m in my seat my belt is on.
Some even have showers on the plane so you can freshen up before arrival on a long transcontinental flight. Imagine hitting turbulence like this in the shower.
By looking both ways and therefore mitigating the risk through reducing the likelihood of being killed while crossing the road by oncoming traffic.
The risk mitigation technique for dealing with severe turbulence which frequently injures people, and only rarely kills people (thankfully), is to keep your seatbelt loosely fastened, and get out of your seat only when you need to.
The fact this is considered absurd by some replies here is a fascinating insight, TBH.
> The fact this is considered absurd by some replies here is a fascinating insight, TBH.
I always thought there were relatively few people with this mentality, that a simple and trivial precaution is totally unacceptable and infringes on their entire life. Then COVID hit and we all saw just how many people would not even lift a pinky finger to help mitigate risk for themselves and others. I don't understand it, either. Do y'all just go out and jump off cliffs every day because you're free to do it?
Do you compare the risk of sitting still during a long-haul flight and possibly developing a DVT to the risk of being killed by turbulence? I would argue that moving around on the plane actually reduces your chance of dying, as it lowers the very real risk of a DVT-related stroke or pulmonary embolism while keeping the risk of dying in strong turbulence still extremely low.
The sad thing is, sods law, whilst having a good chit chat at the bar on say a380 biz and doing about couples bottles of nice wine, or heck even in cattle in the area in front of emergency exits on wide bodies with fellow passenger consuming a few cans of beer (not sure if that works in US - definitely fine on Emirates, SG, Qatar and Etihad) pretending to stretch legs for a good hour, if there is any turbulence I'm probably going land on this guy's head, if he got up and moved about he probably would of survived. Not sure how you quantify that risk. Again, realistically, it so remotely low that any inconvenience isn't worth considering. Partially joking here, partially not.... Just ridiculous to worry about this remote chance to point of strapping yourself in for 10hrs+ and not moving
There are simple exercises that you can do while seated to avoid DVT. Just wriggling your toes help a lot, or flexing the muscles in your legs.
I fly a lot on routes over the tropics and have experienced serious turbulence multiple times. There's no way I will be wandering around the cabin unnecessarily.
I haven’t experienced much turbulence in maybe 15 years, whereas I remember in the 90s I experienced tons of turbulence in almost every flight. I am not sure if this is something modern airliners have been designed to deal with or avoid, or not.
Has anyone else experienced this or is my memory just faulty?
Radar, planning software and routing have all gotten much, much better in the last decade.
I believe even as late as 2007 or 2008, ATC was limited in the deviations it could do due to the track system still in use in certain areas. Once the ARTCC/TRACONs were updated, ATC in the US now has way more capability and capacity to re-route traffic around storms. I forget when the last ARTCC refresh/rebuild happened.
It has gotten better. I, perhaps erroneously, attribute it to better communication between flights/ATC, improved understanding of wind shear, and better forecast models.
Some things never change, though. Front Range of Colorado on a summer afternoon? Gonna be at least a few bumps.
I travelled a lot by plane back when I was working in Luxembourg going back and forth from Italy.
I'll always remember Luxair's tiny Bombardier DHC-8-400 [0], lot of turbulence on those every single time, I guess because they are so small compared to other planes. I had the impression that they could be easily thrown around in the sky, and don't get me started on the noise of those propellers! The combination of the two made it quite the experience.
One thing that I experienced is that planes before flew at lower altitude, so I believe there was more turbulence overall.
Also I remember in the late 80s going right through a storm while in mid flight during a long flight. That hasn't happened to me in the last 15 years. And I flight around 8 times a year.
>> The study also highlighted a new product, a turbulence nowcast, that combines numerous data sources to produce forecasts that are updated every 15 minutes – providing air carriers, all users of the National Airspace System and the air traffic controllers who support them – timely and critical safety information about locations and severity of potential turbulence. The turbulence nowcast is not yet widely used so the NTSB recommended the FAA and the NWS work together to fully implement its adoption and use in the national airspace system.
There is more flexibility on routes over the middle of a trip than near the departure or arrival constraint. Flight over large bodies of water tends to be away from the arrival or departure airport.
Going 100 miles out of your way for weather at a point that's 100 miles from the airport is a big diversion. Going 100 miles laterally out of your way at the midpoint of a 2500nm trip is about an 8 nm deviation (4nm out and 4nm back).
Nah, I remember this as well. I seem to recall many flights having bags in the seat pockets in case you had to throw up.
Luckily with better predictive modeling most flights can avoid these rough patches now. There’s even some apps you can download to see the turbulence forecasts and pilot report maps.
The data seems to show a significant increase in clear-air turbulence, apparently due to increased energy in the system from climate change. I have heard people say "when you add energy into a chaotic system, it becomes more chaotic."
> Moderate turbulence increased by 37%, and light turbulence increased by 17% during this period. Other flight routes over the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and the South Atlantic also significantly increased.
The article states “ Turbulence is most commonly caused by aircraft flying through cloud but there is also "clear air" turbulence which is not visible on a jet's weather radar nor is it possible to predict.”
So are we just avoiding the storms? Or are “clear air” turbulence situations decreasing?
“A September 2022 study predicts that clear-air turbulence will increase significantly around the globe by the period 2050-2080, in particular along the busiest flight routes, and the strongest type of turbulence will increase the most.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/21/world/singapore-airlines-...
https://news.agu.org/press-release/flights-worldwide-face-in...
A new study published online in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, has calculated that climate change will significantly increase the amount of severe turbulence worldwide by 2050–2080. Severe turbulence involves forces stronger than gravity, and is strong enough to throw people and luggage around an aircraft cabin.
Speaking of the physics involved, I was thinking: if it's just free fall, caused by gravity and no air sustaining the wings, this should not happen, right? Some random Quora answer says that it's because during turbulence there is actually air pressing wings down and accelerating them down faster than gravity, and that's why you hit the ceiling. Intuitively that makes sense but, can anyone confirm?
Edit: because if it was just free-falling you should be in a micro-gravity environment
You're assuming things are inelastic and won't 'bounce'. Pretend you're walking down the aisle:
One second of higher-g: you compensate and your legs push harder against the ground. One second of weightlessness: the extra force you were pushing against launches you up, you lose footing and tumble. One second of higher-g: your flailing body is thrown against the ground from the average height of a few feet times the increased gravity. Ow.
Air moves and the plane will move with it, subject to inertia.
Think of the air like water. (Air has fluid dynamics.)If the water suddenly drops away from a boat, the boat isn’t going to magically hover above the water.
> Obviously, but then the boat and all the objects within it would be experiencing the same gravity acceleration, immediately, at the same time.
That is not correct. The airplane experiences this uniformly because the wings transmit the forces to the fuselage. But the contents of the aircraft follow Sir Issac Newton and want to continue their previous motion. If the aircraft experiences high enough negative G then anything not strapped down will appear to rise relative to the fuselage.
To put it another way: you need a physical connection (eg seatbelt or cargo strap) to transmit the force in such an event, just as the fuselage needs a connection to the wings to transmit the force.
Still not convinced. The plane is both carrying you tangentially to the Earth surface (to simplify) and sustaining you against gravity. If a turbulence just makes disappear the sustain against gravity, the wings, the fuselage and everything inside will start free-falling at the same time, effectively being a reduced gravity system. This is what happens in the ISS and there is actually a NASA aircraft (Vomit Comet [1]) that does that on purpose.
OTOH if the aircraft suddenly goes down faster than 1G, let's say 2G, and you are not tied to anything, you will experience a 1G acceleration towards the roof, because you are "just" falling at 1G.
We covered this in the other thread but to give a simple summary:
It is not purely a reduction in lift causing the aircraft to begin free falling.
Different air masses can move in different directions, including downwards or in a circular motion. When the velocity of the air is high enough it can easily push the airplane down faster than free-fall otherwise would.
Free-fall, or really slightly negative G's, will lift you up out of your seat more or less gently. It won't hurt you.
But when the aircraft regains lift, which can happen rapidly in turbulent conditions, you will accelerate downward relative to the cabin. And the plane is design-tested to something like 5G. It can hurt you very badly.
But then you should hurt your butt, not your head as described in the article, no? I still think that if you get your head against the oxygen masks it's because the plane accelerated a lot downwards.
When the airplane experiences high negative G you get propelled upwards at 9.8m/s/s times the negative G. A -1G force cancels the constant +1G force gravity exerts resulting in free-fall or floating. If the negative G force is higher than 1G you are now accelerating upwards relative to the fuselage.
A -2.5G event "pulls" you upward 1.5x harder than falling and you absolutely can die from falling down due to head injury - it happens all the time. In reality it doesn't pull, your inertia simply wants to keep you moving as you were so the top of the fuselage "falls" faster than gravity until it connects with your body and is able to transmit that force to counter your inertia. A better way to transmit that force is a seat belt.
This is exactly the same situation as a car hitting a wall and why you need a seat belt in that scenario too. You and the car are moving forward. The car decelerates. When it does so faster than the friction of you in the seat your inertia carries your body forward. The faster the car stops the more energy you have to impact the windshield/steering wheel/etc. The seat belt functions to transmit the force between your body and the car.
In other words, the people didn't "fly up" and hit their heads, the plane fell on top of them.
Granted they were technically falling, too, but at a slower rate because the force that pushed the plane down - turbulence - acted directly on the plane, but the plane shielded the passengers from the direct effect of the turbulence. Thus the air did not push them down at the same rate that it pushed the plane down onto them.
Exactly, but this is what I'm saying from the beginning :)
EDIT: to clarify, my initial doubt/question was about what actually is the cause for the force that, during a turbulence, makes the plane fall at >1G and thus making you hit the ceiling if you are not tied to the seat?
Ah got it. I'm currently training for PPL so have been studying this among other things.
Entropy causing gasses to mix evenly is true... on a large enough timescale.
In reality any gas or fluid will form boundary layers between masses of the substance having different temperatures, moving at different speeds, or having other properties (eg salinity for a liquid).
When flying you can end up passing through these discontinuities - regions where the air is very turbulent on both sides of the boundary. You can also develop different amounts of lift in one air mass vs another due to density. The entire air mass itself may be moving in a different direction and/or at a different velocity on one side of the boundary vs the other.
In a small airplane the effect is more pronounced. On a bright sunny day near the ground I get negative G when passing over a small bit of water followed by positive G when passing over a hot parking lot. It is very obvious where there is a region of hotter less dense air rising vs cooler more humid air.
SO yes, the final answer is probably just in the land of "air pushing wings down". I'm content with that, going into deep fluid dynamics analysis is probably too much for me at the moment :) Thanks!
Same question here. I suppose that it also hurts (maybe even more?) on the way down because once the wings gain lift, you experience g + lift + your momentum going down ?
The downdraft could actually make the plane accelerate downwards faster than free fall (even just for a second or so), hence everything unattached hitting the ceiling
Sad about the injured and especially the dead person.
I don't think most people realise how violent turbulence can be or how badly things can go. In my last flight, someone on my row removed the seatbelt as soon the light went out and then when we landed, before we exited the runway. Like, why? If it bothers you that much, don't wear it too tight... but at least wear it.
I'll be the first to admit that I held conflicting views:
For one, I never thought someone could die from turbulence (besides a medical condition such as heart risk).
At the same time, I'm sure certain falls/impacts are quite lethal even in very short distances.
Yet, i dont understand how turbulence makes a plane fall 6000 ft in 3min, unless the automated (turbulence?) avoidance system engaged and caused the injury in the 1st place. Yet, at the same time, the rate of descent may have been necessary to keep control of the plane.
Descending 6000 feet in 3 minutes is by no means special, that's just journalists being bad. Planes regularly descend at a higher rate, and nobody gets injured. Also, you don't need that high of a fall to have people get injured, a few tens of meters is more than enough, if it happens very suddenly (seconds, not minutes), which is the case with turbulence.
> Yet, i dont understand how turbulence makes a plane fall 6000 ft in 3min
That's because it didn't, and armchair experts are breathlessly reporting on a completely normal (if even a bit slow) descent from cruising altitude to a lower altitude as part of their arrival into Bangkok.
> unless the automated (turbulence?) avoidance system engaged
There is no such thing. Civilian airliners don't have any automatic avoidance systems - they can only notify the pilots when there's a windshear (drastic wind change), another plane very close by, terrain close by, etc. But it's only (very strong) warnings, and it's impossible to detect/predict turbulence.
There is no such thing as turbulence detection. And I haven’t heard of automatic avoidance in any airplane I know about. (Unless you’re referring to something like the F-16 ground avoidance system.)
There is “wind shear detection” but that relies on the planes weather radar detecting moving columns of water droplets.
>> The study also highlighted a new product, a turbulence nowcast, that combines numerous data sources to produce forecasts that are updated every 15 minutes – providing air carriers, all users of the National Airspace System and the air traffic controllers who support them – timely and critical safety information about locations and severity of potential turbulence. The turbulence nowcast is not yet widely used so the NTSB recommended the FAA and the NWS work together to fully implement its adoption and use in the national airspace system.
There are no details here. Thw two obvious questions that will be investigated are:
1. Was there any warning for the turbulence? A lot can be picked up by radar but not all and it depends on what equipment the airplane has although Singapore Airlines isn't known for skimping on equipment like that.
2. Was the seat belt sign on? Was the passenger wearing their seat belt?
Basically, was the airline at fault? Was the crew at fault? Was the pasesnger at fault? Or was it just an freak accident? This will take time to answer.
I am confident that authorities (and insurance companies), will want to apportion blame.
However, I want to just stress: while there are some known poor conditions tech can help pilots avoid (for example, thunder storms - pilots avoid those clouds for good reason), there are many types of turbulence which can not be predicted or detected by ground or air based systems.
We are all individually responsible for our behaviour on the aircraft. Regardless of the seatbelt sign status, keep it fastened when seated. If it's lit, stay seated. If it isn't, minimise the time you're not seated. Yes, it's not great on long haul, but the difference between smooth air and being thrown around by an air pocket is seconds. This severity is thankfully very rare, but that doesn't mean any of us should not consider it a risk when deciding how to behave in a plane cabin.
> I am confident that authorities (and insurance companies), will want to apportion blame.
In general this isn't how airline investigations actually work. They instead use the concept of "just cause" meaning that the assumption is that the system failed, and that any mistake is the child of many parents, none whom are at fault on their own. This is why flying is so safe, no one in the entire system is afraid to report failures or mistakes because the assumption is to get better, not to punish why something is bad.
There may be a single final failure but why did was the system set up to allow that to happen at all in the first place is the question. In this case there will certainly be investigations at every level from the flight crew and cabin crew training, to their sleep schedule, to the forecasts, to the flight path planning, to the policies around passengers moving around the cabin, to even how the plane was balanced on passenger and cargo loading. There's going to be a combination of factors no doubt, but no one's going to get fired (some individuals may resign or retire from the stress of handling such a situation, which no one would fault them for). Singapore just got voted the #1 airline in the world, they will take this as seriously as if the entire plane went down.
These findings will then be applied to every major airline and aircraft in the world so that it never happens again. With a few very public recent incidents, any specific type of airline accident tends to happen only once.
Apportioning blame is one thing the authorities will not want to do:
"The TSIB is the air, marine and rail accidents and incidents investigation authority in Singapore. Its mission is to promote transport safety through the conduct of independent investigations into air, marine and rail accidents and incidents.
The sole objective of TSIB’s safety investigations is the prevention of transport accidents and incidents. The safety investigations do not seek to apportion blame or liability. Accordingly, TSIB reports should not be used to assign blame or determine liability."
And:
"The sole objective of the investigation of an accident or incident under these Regulations is the prevention of future accidents and incidents. It is not the purpose of such an investigation to apportion blame or liability.
Accordingly, it is inappropriate that [UK] AAIB reports should be used to assign fault or blame or determine liability, since neither the investigation nor the reporting process has been undertaken for that purpose."
Apportioning blame is how you lose transparency in air accident investigations.
I don't know this case, but there were many cases before that:
1. No, in most cases it is CAT (clear air turbulence). CB turbulence is easily detected by radar and avoided; CAT doesn't show on radar as there are no clouds involved.
2. No, since it comes without a warning. I mean there are forecasts of CAT, and you also hear what other aircraft report (the ATC takes that into account too), but every now and then someone has to be the first to enter some more shaky air.
Also, in most cases this is at best moderate turbulence (meaning it doesn't really affect the handling of the plane), but that is enough to temporarily get from 1g to 0g or below, and make some passenger fly up in the cabin, then fall down.
The seatbelt sign instructs passengers not to move around the cabin, not to fasten their seatbelt. Seatbelts should be fastened at all times when passengers are seated, as the flight staff reminds us before each and every flight.
You know, I've been traveling a lot by place for the past 12 years, and its always been my personal terror, to have no seatbelt and the place hitting a turbulence throwing me on the ceiling... now I know it can happen.
I was once on a flight where my seatbelt refused to fasten and I said nothing because I didn't want to be moved away from my wife. Let me tell you, after reading this, that will never happen again.
> Turbulence is most commonly caused by aircraft flying through cloud but there is also "clear air" turbulence which is not visible on a jet's weather radar nor is it possible to predict.
Is this actually impossible for some theoretical constraint or have we just not invested in the R&D?
You can do it with lasers, see this paper and references. Seems like small trials have been initiated since 2017 but no widespread use or FAA approval yet.
Sibling comment from thedrbrian explains it very well while it is unlikely to see clear air turbulence (CAT) with our current weather radars.
Of course if cost would be not an object we could detect these events. One possible solution would be to fly companion drones ahead of the jet. They could then detect CAT quite easily by just running into them. The spacing is critical with this scheme. If the probe drone is too far ahead you risk CAT developing between it and your plane. If it is too close you won't have enough warning time. If it is even closer you just rammed the drone and that can cause complications in itself.
Another possible option is to use laser backscatter. If you shine a laser forward from the airplane some of it bounces back from microparticles. If you measure the doppler shift of the light bounced back (probably with interferometry) you can tell the projected component of the relative speed of the particles. There is a ton of complications with this. But in theory you could make a "lidar" kind of thing which scans forward from the airplane and measure CATs directly.
The same kind which pushes the airplane? Heck you can just use two airplanes since we are talking about a situation where costs are not a problem. Everything else is just cost optimisation.
The 787 has been in the news very recently for two possibly related incidences of sudden nose-down resulting in similar injuries. They aren't turbulence related, but writing "Boeing" and "injury" in the same headline is going to draw clicks.
For all the pontificating in this thread about the need to follow safety advice regarding the wearing of seat belts (and bicycle helmets!) at all times, please note the following from the BBC report:
> the London-Singapore flight suffered a sudden drop as a meal service was under way.
Meal service is probably the single most vulnerable moment to encounter turbulence. How many of the safety-first-at-all-times brigade could dine while tightly strapped to their seat? And no matter how tightly strapped in you are, you could not avoid being splashed by scalding coffee, as some passengers on the in the report were.
Also, the flight time from London to Singapore is 13 hours and 15 minutes (non-stop). How many of you would stay tightly strapped in at all times for that long?
I always eat with the seatbelt fastened. Why do you need to remove it? Considering the reduced leg space these days, the tray table is relatively within reach.
Besides, I do a 12h route at least once a year, and yes I always have them on unless I'm stretching my legs or going to the toilet because that's the safety recommendation—not because I like it—I don't get your point.
Yeah I'm a little confused by that myself. It's a lap belt - why on earth would you need to even loosen it to eat? Even in business/first class suites, the lap belt is independent of the shoulder harness and you can wear just the lap belt for most of the flight.
I'm flying LHR -> MEL on Friday on Singapore Airlines (on a 777 actually for LHR -> SIN).
I tend to keep my seat belt fairly loosly fastened throughout the flight. At least once I've experienced bad turbulence around where this flight had it - enough to make me hold tightly onto things and for service to be stopped. Usually I need a few trips to the bathroom during the flight though and if nothing else, a chance to stretch my legs (20 hours on planes in 24 hours means walking around is important).
Be interesting to see if anything is different on board (either with crew or fellow pax). RIP to the guy who died.
Maybe passengers would buckle their belts at all times, however cabin crew is the most vulnerable during meal service. Also, are the pilots required to wear belts at all times?
> The Associated Press has analysed tracking data captured by FlightRadar24 which showed the Singapore Airlines flight cruising at an altitude of 37,000 ft. Just after 8am GMT, the Boeing 777 suddenly pitched down to 31,000 ft over the span of about three minutes, the data indicates.
The interior damage appears extreme. Can any mech-aero engs or pilots confirm?
EDIT: It's suggested on aviation forums that unbelted passengers hitting the interior broke the plastic retaining clips holding interior panels, leading to dangling debris.
That's a well-known thing. Turbulence injuries come from being launched into the ceiling of the plane due to negative Gs. It's why the seatbelt is important - to restrain you to your seat.
I think you might be severely underestimating the forces involved, as well as confusing "strong" engineering for safe engineering.
A ceiling that buckles when a human slams into it at an acceleration of -4g or more is a ceiling that doesn't severely fracture their skull and possibly kill them instantly.
According to the NTSB data, turbulence encounters like this are the leading cause of airline accidents. Turbulence is the leading cause, not flying in a Boeing airframe, or whatever other meme you may have been sold.
No. Passengers often experience things as "a big drop" while no such thing happened.
In this case several news sites even claim it dropped 6000ft. But if you read the Avherald report (often a very good source) or look at the ADS-B data, you'll see they descended 6000ft in approximately 10 minutes. So that was just the crew deciding to get out of the turbulence by changing altitude in a normal way.
You don't stall a jet from turbulence unless you're far higher than the maximum allowed altitude or otherwise way outside normal flight parameters.
while the loose seatbelt at the minimum throughout the flight has been highlighted here, there are other aspects here that did not go well.
why was meal service provided when the staff is aware of the weather conditions? the seatbelt sign is usually shown at a slight deterioration of weather, i wonder why they went ahead with this.
Instead of just walking around, drink lots of water and then go to the bathroom, and rinse and repeat (it also works if you don't enjoy your job office).
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/seat-belt-sign-airplane-FLASHINGBELT0218-abe199337ad04b10b76be54446c78591.jpg){kind=link}
> "Some people hit their heads on the baggage cabins overhead and dented it, they hit the places where lights and masks are and broke straight through it."
That's why I try to keep my seatbelt on at all times, ever since I went through some rough turbulences on my way to Dubai (layover)