Heavy Turbulence on Flights Is Likely to Get Worse
Meteorologists predict more bumpy flights as climate change makes hard-to-detect clear-air turbulence more common
4 min
Flights headed to Honolulu, Tampa, Fla., and Frankfurt in recent months hit turbulence so severe that some passengers and crew ended up in the hospital with injuries.
Actor Matthew McConaughey was a passenger on the Lufthansa flight to Germany. In a recent podcast interview with Kelly Ripa, he described seeing red wine suspended in midair before it crashed down.
“It was a hell of a scare,” Mr. McConaughey, who wasn’t hospitalised, said on the podcast. “A complete loss of control.”
Pilots and meteorologists say bumps are a normal part of flying. The Federal Aviation Administration is still investigating the Lufthansa flight. But meteorologists say climate change is distorting the jet stream, making a certain type of severe turbulence—called clear-air turbulence—more likely in the future.
Severe turbulence injuries are rare. Between 2009 and 2022, 163 people were seriously injured during turbulence, according to National Transportation Safety Board data. Flight attendants, who are more likely to be standing during flights, are most likely to get injured, the data show.
What the science says
Though technology that reports turbulence has vastly improved in recent decades, it can be tough to predict.
“You’re talking about a little pin drop in the atmosphere,” says Bill Duncan, head of aviation forecasting operations at the Weather Co., which supplies turbulence forecasts and weather insights to major airlines.
Turbulence happens when swirling air currents push against the wing of the plane, which then moves the wings up and down or the body of the plane from side to side, says Paul D. Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in England.
Atmospheric pressure, changing wind direction, air around mountains and cold- or warm-weather fronts can cause turbulence, physicists say.
Turbulence caused by wind shear, meaning sudden changes in the speed and direction of wind, is called clear-air turbulence. It is called this because it occurs at higher altitudes in cloudless areas. Aircraft can change altitude suddenly, and pilots usually can’t detect this type of turbulence in advance.
Since 1979, the amount of wind shear in the jet stream has increased 15%, according to a study Dr. Williams co-wrote that was published in the science journal Nature in 2019. At higher altitudes where planes fly, climate change is altering temperature patterns, which creates more wind shear, he says.
Dr. Williams’s research predicts that the amount of clear-air turbulence in the atmosphere in the mid-Northern Hemisphere is expected to more than double over the next three to six decades.
Some of the more popular international flight routes from the U.S., such as New York-London and San Francisco-Tokyo, will experience more clear-air turbulence because they fly in the mid-Northern Hemisphere, he says.
Changes in procedure
Flight crews now use more specific language to address different levels of turbulence, says Dennis Tajer, a captain for American Airlines and spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, a union. He began flying for commercial airlines about 30 years ago and says he encounters more clear-air turbulence now compared with early in his career.
American Airlines updated its flight manual in May 2022 to better define turbulence procedures for flight crews. The captain turns on the seat belt sign for all types of turbulence, but crews now take specific actions depending on the severity of the turbulence, he says.
During severe turbulence, flight attendants need to secure carts, place hot liquids in carts or on the floor and secure themselves as quickly as possible by sitting down in the nearest seat or on the floor.
American and United are among the airlines that give pilots access to software called SkyPath, which crowdsources turbulence reports from pilots’ iPads in real time.
SkyPath uses vibrations from the pilot’s iPad to measure turbulence and reports out to other nearby aircraft, providing advance warning of the conditions in real time, a United spokeswoman said in an email.
Tips for navigating turbulence
- Wear your seat belt. Staying strapped in is the best way to protect yourself if your flight hits unexpected turbulence, pilots and flight attendants say.
- Take precautions with children under 2. The FAA recommends passengers use an approved child-safety seat or device if traveling with a child under 2. Airlines don’t require children that young to have their own seats. Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, and the union have renewed calls for all passengers to have their own seats.
- Secure your electronics and other hand-held devices. Anything that isn’t tied down can become a projectile, Ms. Nelson says.
- Remember the odds. Turbulence is scary because it is often unexpected and uncomfortable, says Todd Farchione, a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Take a deep breath and realise you’re not truly in danger. Planes are built to withstand even heavy turbulence, pilots and physicists say.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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