London - Do you remember how you felt the last time your plane was hit by turbulence? If you are anything like most passengers, you almost certainly endured a nerve-shredding experience.
But an airline pilot has now offered reassurance to nervous flyers after penning a blog which discusses the facts surrounding the topic.
Patrick Smith, an active airline pilot and author, suggests that turbulence “is far and away the number one concern of nervous flyers”.
However, in his Ask The Pilot blog, Smith says pilots consider incidents of rough air to be nothing more than “a comfort and convenience issue, not a safety issue per se. Annoying, but not dangerous”.
Talking about what happens to the aircraft during an episode of turbulence, the 48-year-old said: “During turbulence, the pilots are not fighting the controls.
“Planes are designed with what we call positive stability, meaning that when nudged from their original point in space, by their nature they wish to return there.
“The best way of handling rough air is to effectively ride it out, hands-off. (Some autopilots have a turbulence mode that desensitises the system, to avoid over-controlling.)
“It can be uncomfortable, but the jet is not going to flip upside down.”
Smith added: “For what it’s worth, thinking back over the whole history of modern commercial aviation, I cannot recall a single jetliner crash caused by turbulence, strictly speaking.
“Airplanes are engineered to withstand an extreme amount of stress, and the amount of turbulence required to, for instance, tear off a wing, is far beyond anything you’ll ever experience.”
Boston-based Smith, took his first flying lesson at 14. His first job with an airline came in 1990 and he has since flown cargo and passenger jets on both domestic and international routes.
He travels extensively in his spare time and has visited more than 70 countries.
His Ask the Pilot column initially ran in the online magazine Salon.com for 10 years between 2002 until 2012.
He was voted one of the 25 Best Bloggers of 2013 by TIME magazine, and has also published a book called Cockpit Confidential – described as a behind the scenes look at “the strange and misunderstood business of commercial aviation”.
Just last week eight passengers and 14 crew members were injured on board a Singapore Airlines flight to Mumbai when it hit sudden turbulence. A number of those hurt were treated in hospital after the A380 flight number SQ424 landed safely at Mumbai’s Terminal 2 after the plane was shaken at 15 000ft.
In May 2013, 11 passengers were injured and photos revealed a chaotic cabin when a flight with the same carrier ran into turbulence on the way to London during food service.
However, Smith said that such incidents appeared to be extremely rare, adding that passengers who report such incidents often exaggerate the effects.
“Be wary of passenger accounts in news stories,” he said.
“People have a terrible habit of misinterpreting and exaggerating the sensations of flight, particularly if they’re scared.”
“Even in considerably bumpy air – what a pilot might call ‘moderate turbulence,’ a plane is seldom displaced in altitude by more than 20 feet, and usually less.
“And of the small number of passengers injured each year, the vast majority of them are people who did not have their seat belts on when they should have.”
While Smith admits that patches of turbulence can occur unexpectedly, most incidents are reported to the pilots well in advance, giving passengers time to return to their seats and fasten their seatbelts following instructions from the captain. – Daily Mail