A CAT (acronym for Clear Air Turbulence, translated as ‘turbulence in clear air’) turned London-Singapore this Monday into a nightmare. The passengers and crew of Singapore Airlines flight 321, one of the seven that connect Heathrow and Changi airports daily, will hardly forget it. The Asian airline alternates its Airbus A380 and Boeing 777-300 to cover the high demand for this line.
The plane assigned for the flight in which one passenger died last night and 30 others were injured by severe blows, was a Boeing. Registered as 9V-SWM and that in recent days, in addition to always passing through Singapore on the way out or returning, it had arrived at airports such as Melbourne, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Tokyo, specific trips lasting between three and 14 hours.
Last night, this 777 landed in Bangkok. He did it outside the program after suffering turbulence in clear air. A pleasant trip in one of the best companies in the world turned into a very unpleasant flight to the point of having to divert the plane and land 1,500 kilometers before reaching the destination in order to treat the thirty wounded and recover the body of a 73-year-old British citizen. One of the first voices to speak about what he experienced on board the plane was one of its passengers, Dzafran Azmir, 28, who told Reuters that the plane fell suddenly and people were thrown in all directions.
“That’s what happens in strong turbulence. If the fall is as abrupt as what the passengers and crew of this flight have allegedly experienced, it would probably be clear air. They are unpredictable,” Rosa María, flight attendant on long-haul lines, tells La Vanguardia. “That is why we always recommend that passengers wear their seat belts at all times, even when the light signal is off. In these cases, the most serious injuries are suffered by those who were standing or sitting without securing themselves to the seat,” she adds. “I have been flying on intercontinental lines for 17 years and although these are personal sensations, the flights in recent years have had more turbulence than before,” she acknowledges.
Although the information available before the flight and also in the cabin during the trip is increasingly better and more accurate, CAT or clear air turbulence is practically undetectable. They are caused by sudden changes in wind speed and direction and are called clear air because they occur at a higher altitude in clear areas. This causes planes to suddenly lose altitude, with the handicap that pilots are usually unable to detect this type of turbulence in advance. They have maps where there could be them, although they are only hypotheses and not definitive data.
“The phenomena that alter a normal flight are increasingly common and I believe that in the same way that technology advances, the way to detect what is currently difficult to do should also be improved,” says Lourdes, aviator and airline commander. “We know, for example, that the jet stream over the Atlantic is what helps us and makes it possible for, for example, a flight from Spain to the United States to be shorter than doing it in the opposite direction, although the clear air turbulence that occurs “They occur in that area and are almost impossible to detect and are becoming more and more frequent,” confirms this aviator.
The person who corroborates the words and feelings of the two crew members who spoke this afternoon with La Vanguardia is Paul D. Williams, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Reading, in the county of Berkshire, England. In 2019, Williams published a study in the scientific journal Nature showing that since 1979, the amount of wind shear in the jet stream has increased by 15%. The cause indicated in this study is that at higher altitudes, which is where airplanes fly, climate change is altering temperature patterns, which creates more wind shear and more situations in which aircraft can be affected by this phenomenon. .
In March 2023, a Lufthansa Airbus traveling from Austin to Frankfurt was affected by clear air turbulence 90 minutes after takeoff from the Texas airport. The German reactor ended up being diverted to Washington so that several injured people could be treated there. Three months earlier, another Airbus, this time from Hawaiian Airlines, suffered severe turbulence on a flight from Phoenix to Honolulu. In this case, everything happened in the final phase of the trip and the 20 injured were treated upon arriving at the island.