London-Singapore flight: more frequent turbulence due to climate change?
What are the causes of the extreme turbulence which caused the death of a Singapore Airlines passenger and injured around 80 others on Tuesday May 21? The question is agitating many international media.
Flight SQ321 between London and Singapore turned into a nightmare after the tenth hour of flight. The Singapore Airlines Boeing 777, which was carrying 211 passengers and 18 crew members, was then caught in a violent episode of turbulence, to the point of being diverted to Bangkok, Thailand.
A 73-year-old British passenger, Geoffrey Kitchen, died of a possible heart attack, and “20 injured people (were) still in intensive care on May 22,” reports Singaporean daily newspaper The Straits Times. Investigators have arrived in Bangkok to try to shed light on what led this turbulence to cause so much damage, notes his side the press agency Associated Press (AP).
Atmospheric turbulence is caused by changes in air currents affecting the stability of a flight. Asked by the Swiss newspaper The weather, André Richter, a former pilot who is now an aeronautics consultant, believes that the Singapore Airlines flight could have been the victim of “what we call clear air turbulence (also abbreviated as CAT)”. Turbulence in clear skies, more difficult to detect.
More shaking
At altitude, the tremors felt by planes are often linked to storms, terrain or sudden changes in temperature. And if “the death of a passenger due to shocks suffered by an aircraft remains an extremely rare event”, writing The weather, It not remain that ” turbulence itself could become more and more frequent under the effect of climate change”.
A hypothesis studied by the scientific journal Nature, which cites a study published in 2023 by the British University of Reading. This work demonstrates a significant increase in the number of atmospheric turbulences between 1979 and 2020. “Over the North Atlantic, the clear air turbulence are 55% more common” during this period, indicates Nature.
The reason for this increase? If the link between an increase in the number of episodes of turbulence and climate change cannot yet be categorically stated, “warming of the air due to CO emissions2 increases wind shear (abrupt change in wind direction and power) in jet streams (high-altitude currents), reinforcing turbulence” in clear skies, summarizes The weather.
And, bad news for the devices, the recurrence of strong turbulence risks increasing more than that of lighter ones.
Don’t panic, however, pilots have tools – notably data collected by satellite – to predict risk areas and therefore adjust their flight plan. “In terms of weather monitoring, technology is progressing rapidly. Today we have several applications that allow us to anticipate weather phenomena, particularly turbulence, in a much more reliable and precise way than before. ensures Time Sylvain Fivaz, spokesperson for Aeropers, the union of pilots of Swiss and Edelweiss, two Swiss airlines.
