Bjorn Birnir dreads an airplane seatmate asking what he does for a living. That’s because Dr. Birnir is one of the world’s leading scholars of turbulence, the chaotic movement of fluids, such as water or air, in the midst of a disturbance. Inevitably, the seatmate will ask Dr. Birnir the one question he knows is coming and is loath to answer: Just how dangerous is turbulence, anyway?
These days, that question is being asked with increasing frequency by the three million people who fly each day in and out of American airports alone. Once seemingly relegated to a background annoyance of commercial aviation, like bad food and insufficient leg room, severe turbulence is only getting worse. In 2023, British researchers used meteorological data gathered over several decades to arrive at the conclusion that severe turbulence over the North Atlantic had increased by 55 percent between 1979 and 2020. (The study looked only at clear-air turbulence, which occurs when a plane isn’t flying through a storm or above a mountain range; that kind of turbulence is especially difficult to predict.)
“I have thought many times that it would be wonderful if we could make air travel a little more pleasant,” said Dr. Birnir, who runs the Center for Complex and Nonlinear Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and also chairs the mathematics department there. His latest contribution to that effort is a recent paper in the scientific journal Physical Review Research that he said presented arguably the most advanced model of turbulent motion. This model could, in turn, help engineers who strive to make flight safer and less stressful.
“Airplane design is going to benefit,” Dr. Birnir said. “We should definitely see better meteorological models.”
Thomas Q. Carney, a retired professor of aviation technology at Purdue University who has logged more than 11,000 flight hours as a pilot, said, “The better the model, the more it captures of the particular turbulent field, then the better the forecast, which is what the pilot is going to use.”
Flying on American carriers remains exceptionally safe, but recent accidents have started to erode confidence in commercial aviation. This month, the National Transportation Safety Board released an interim report on a Delta Air Lines flight that injured several people during an encounter in late July with unexpectedly rough air over Wyoming. The pilots had sought to avoid bad weather, only to unexpectedly get tossed about by turbulent flows. (Climate change may also be having an effect, since a warming atmosphere affects air pressure and wind speed.)
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The post Now Arriving: A New Theory of In-Flight Turbulence appeared first on New York Times.
