The northern hemisphere has just gone through its snowiest January days in 40 years and polar temperatures reached as far South as Orlando in Florida. Sure, this is not abnormal some may say… but what if we do not have to wait forty years for the next episode?
An Air France flight en-route from Brazil to France encountered so severe turbulence that they issued a Mayday call but subsequently they completed the flight without incident. As we all know, AF447 was less fortunate.
Over the past 18 month or so, there were several incidents where unexpected severe turbulence caused passenger injuries…
And now the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) says, as reported in Aviation Week, that “climate change could be contributing to more extreme weather conditions at high altitudes that have not previously been encountered by aircraft”.
Make no mistake, although the current investigation of the crash of AF447 talks a lot about the problems with pitot tubes prone to freezing, there is a much more sinister implication here. Pilots are trained to handle situations where pitot tube data is lost or is unreliable… You cannot however train pilots to fly an aircraft with a wing or stabilizer gone. This is the point… who says extreme weather can only come in the form of extreme cold and not also as extreme turbulence?
So far we all thought we knew the atmosphere… more or less. With climate change creeping upon us (for whatever natural or man-made reasons), we better admit that things are not as they used to be. Tornados in Hungary or floods in January may be easy to explain but normal they are not.
If some of the rules in the atmosphere have already changed (and apparently they have), we better go back to square one and admit that the once well charted territory has suddenly become the great unknown. Or at least something that we should no longer take for granted.
The consequences can be potentially huge. If the planes need to be built stronger, the weight penalty will put the operators in front of some cruel choices. Really long-range air travel has only recently become common place and the margins there are pretty slim. But potential trouble is not limited to high-altitude flight. If wind patterns change on the ground making some runways point in the wrong direction most of the time; if heavy snow and ice disrupts traffic in the Winter on more than just a few days; if… we could go on listing the many more climate related changes that spell trouble for anything that flies and which make the life of air traffic management experts extra hard.
Aviation is the forerunner of all industries in its efforts to reduce its impact on the environment and to make operating aircraft more cost efficient. However, no amount of effort from aviation or from anyone else will be enough to reverse the changes that have already taken place and which are impacting aircraft in the air already to-day.
A debate on whether these changes are just a natural evolution of the world or are man made is senseless. If turbulence breaks a wing, you crash no matter who caused the extreme turbulence.
So, alongside the many laudable efforts to protect the environment, is it not time to start thinking about protecting the industry FROM the environment? Weather related problems, en-route or on the ground, are not easy to deal with at the best of times. Severe weather related problems can be even harder to crack.
We should also not forget that Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) with their ultra precise following of 4D trajectories, the mainstay of projects like SESAR and NextGen, are not exactly cut out for extreme weather… Yet there is no Plan B in SESAR or NextGen for scenarios where weather related disruptions become the norm… as they may very well do in the coming decade.
It is probably the 24th hour for air traffic management experts, the airlines and manufacturers to sit together and start figuring out what Plan B should be.
Just keeping the wings attached will not be enough.
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