I used to be someone who was extremely anxious about flying. I wasn’t the type to take a bus across a continent rather than hop on a plane, but I was definitely pretty scared of flying.
It was an acquired anxiety, an anxiety that had settled in my stomach during a day spent bouncing around in a small plane in a storm during the 1988 presidential campaign. I would look at the sky before takeoff and ask myself if the pilot was really going to fly in a plane like that.
The pilot did indeed do so, perhaps testing his ability to dodge quickly through storm clouds. The experience made me envy my ping-pong ball-like workdays. Then, in the fall of that year, my wife and I flew to Ireland. Our destination was Dublin, but the flight was diverted to Limerick because of bad weather. I tried to convince myself that the shaking and pulsation of the aircraft was nothing to worry about. But then one of the flight attendants screamed as she fastened her seatbelt.
Two recent news reports brought that experience back to life: Last week, a Singapore Airlines plane encountered unexpected severe turbulence toward the end of a flight from London to Singapore. One male passenger is believed to have died of a heart attack and more than 40 people were injured, some seriously. On Sunday, a Qatar Airways flight bound for Ireland encountered severe turbulence, injuring six passengers and six crew members, eight of whom required hospital treatment.
Of course, the biggest fear for most flyers isn’t getting hurt during the flight, but that turbulence will cause the plane to crash. That was my worry, but my brother is now an air traffic controller and he gave me this reassuring piece of information: turbulence rarely causes commercial airliners to crash.
You have to go back quite a long way to find the last time a commercial airliner suffered a catastrophe due solely to high-altitude turbulence (microbursts during takeoff and landing are a bit of a different story). Here’s what I found: On December 2, 1968, a Vienna Consolidated Airlines propeller plane encountered severe turbulence, developed a structural failure, and crashed into Pedro Bay, Alaska. All 36 passengers and three crew members were killed in the accident.
On March 5, 1966, a BOA flight carrying 113 passengers and 11 crew members encountered severe clear-air turbulence near Mount Fuji in Japan. These extreme conditions caused the plane’s vertical stabilizer to break off. This tail then struck one of the horizontal stabilizers, causing the horizontal stabilizer to also break off. The resulting lateral pressure caused the engine to fail.
But those disasters occurred more than half a century ago, and experts say that while today’s planes are built to withstand the stresses of severe turbulence, modern technology makes it much easier to model, predict, and avoid severe turbulence.
“I’ve been flying for 42 years, and to my knowledge, no aircraft has ever crashed or broken apart in flight due to high-altitude turbulence,” says a friend, a former Navy pilot and major airline pilot. “Turbulence causes you to fly slower, which allows you to make quicker maneuvers without structural damage, but the aircraft structure is designed to withstand the forces of turbulence, even at those speeds, without prior knowledge.”
Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot for about 35 years and owner of the excellent educational website Ask a Pilot, said there’s a big disconnect between people’s fears about turbulence and the reality: that turbulence is a normal part of the air and that pilots have little to worry about beyond worrying about passenger discomfort.
“You have to get rid of the idea that planes can go out of control in turbulence,” he said. “Especially severe turbulence can temporarily knock a plane out of position in space, but the idea that it’s going to make the plane go out of control or tear off wings is actually just an illusion.”
That doesn’t mean turbulence can’t throw someone off the plane and cause serious injury or death. It can. But perspective matters. The FAA reported 163 serious injuries from turbulence between 2009 and 2022. That’s a very small number, considering that about 2.6 million passengers fly into and out of U.S. airports every day. And 129 of those injuries were sustained by flight attendants, the people least likely to have their seatbelts on in an unexpected moment of turbulence.
Here’s another data point I rely on when I run into trouble during a flight: Your annual risk of dying in a plane accident is about 1 in 11 million. Your annual risk of dying in a car accident is about 1 in 5,000.
So whether you’re flying or driving a car, wear your seat belt: you’ll worry less while flying and less while driving.
Scott Lehigh is a columnist for the Globe. Contact him at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him: translation:.
