When is Turbulence DANGEROUS?!

hi everybody welcome to mentors are not video podcast as always hope you're doing absolutely fantastic today on the video guys we're gonna be talking about turbulence what is it what causes it and what do we the pilots up in the front do about it when it occurs stay tuned this video is brought to you in cooperation with brilliant org now if you are like me you didn't really enjoy the math lessons and the physics lessons in school well now there is help for you if you check out brilliant at all the 501st of you who uses this link here below will get 20% off the annual fee with brilliant and they will make learning maths and physics and solving problems really fun and interactive so check it out [Music] like as I have really looked forward to making this episode because I know that there's a lot of you guys out there who might be nervous fliers and I know the number one reason that you are nervous is because of turbulence so in this episode today I'm gonna be talking about what causes turbulence whether or not is dangerous and what we the pilots up in the front do in case we encounter turbulence under different circumstances so there are different types of turbulence there are turbulence that are caused by surface friction and the air moving around obstacles and over mountains for example this is called mechanical turbulence and you will often feel this when you taking off during really really windy conditions right so if you take an offer an airport that is close to for example a mountain range like here in girona we're close to the pyrenees behind me or there might be a lot of buildings or a city very close by well then as the air is moving over these obstacles they're kind of it's similar to a fluid so if you've been looking at a stream that's flowing around the rock you know that the water would be flowing around the rock and after it it would create some vortexes now the air will do exactly the same thing so if the air is moving over a large optical like a mountain range for example those vortexes might be you know might be closing turbulence to quite high altitude um most of the cases when we're talking about surface friction turbulence it's only for maybe a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand feet and after that it gets smoother again but this is very prevalent especially in during windy conditions and that's the kind of turbulence that you will come across most of the case when you get up into the higher part of the atmosphere it's always very windy up there but it's not always turbulent and we'll get to that in a second now the next type of turbulence that I'm sure that you have all come across is the turbulence that you experience when you climb into a cloud mass um not all clouds will cause turbulence the the clouds that tend to cause turbulence or the convective wants by convective I mean that the the clouds are being formed by the Sun heating up the earth now when it gets hot enough it would release like a bubble of air and inside of that there's a lot of moisture now as hot air is going up and climbing up to the atmosphere it will slowly and slowly and surely get colder alright colder and colder as it gets higher at a certain point it will reach its dew point which is where it will turn from water vapor into water droplets and that's when you see clouds forming right when it does that if you're not a physics then you know that as the water vapor is turning into water droplets it will all of a sudden release energy that means that when it does that inside of the cloud formation you will get some turbulence okay it's caused both by the movement of the air the actual updraft inside of the cloud and also by that release of energy inside of a cloud so this means that these nice kind of cotton looking clouds that you'll see during the during the summer they might actually cause quite a bit of turbulence from lights to moderate turbulence and but it's not dangerous right not in any way but there is a type of cloud that can cause the turbulence that is actually dangerous and that is its bigger cousin the cumulonimbus cloud çb cloud now a Seabee cloud is essentially a small cumulus clouds that has continued to grow right it might be because of the atmosphere being very unstable that will help the the cloud formation to continue to grow or there might be a lot of heat or there might be a lot of moisture and a combination of that can cause a small cumulus cloud to become a cumulant sort of small cumulus cloud to become a large cumulonimbus cloud and what you will see then is a cloud that looks a little bit like a mushroom right it will continue to grow at very dark normally and at the top kind of spread out and look a little bit like cotton cotton candy because at the top it tends to be down to minus 50 56 degrees Celsius or even colder than that and it causes a ice crystals to form and when that happened there will be loads of hot air being sucked up through the cloud it will cool down at the top and it will don't start falling down and you get a lot of movement of the air inside of the cloud those clouds are dangerous and aircraft are not supposed to fly inside of them if they do we might come across extreme turbulence which might actually cause problems with the structure of the aircraft so the good thing with these clouds is that they also have a lot of moisture inside of them and when you have a lot of moisture it means that our weather radar will be able to detect them so as we're flying around we have a weather radar on we'll be able to see these clouds very clearly they tend to be very small in geographical spread so they're very local but very high but it also means that it's fairly easy to avoid them and if we can't avoid them let's say that there are several of them they can also be caused by a frontal movement so if cold air is coming in then it's pushing up hot moist air they can also cross this clouds and then you can get what we call a squall line which is a lot of these cumulonimbus clouds in a row well if you can't pass it and if we can't avoid it we're just gonna be turning around landing somewhere else diverting to a different airport and that's because we never take the risk of flying into a cumulus cloud okay so that's C B clouds air and they can be then dangerous and I've talked about them in the different episodes as well and you can check that out of it now the next thing I want to talk about is clear air turbulence a clear air turbulence is a little bit different because it doesn't have moisture in it it can appear you know we're just flying along you don't see anything there's nothing on the weather radar and all of a sudden start to be bumpy clear air turbulence can be formed either on the side of a cumulonimbus cloud because the cumulus cloud storm cloud is actually disturbing the air and that can cause clearer turbulence even if you're not in contact with the cloud itself it can be caused by what we talked earlier about mountain ranges so the air could be pushed from one side of the mountain range going over it and then causing big rotor the kind of war Texas on the opposite side now normally if you see these beautiful looking lenticularis clouds it looks almost like UFOs that is an indication of these rotors being Crescent so even though they look very docile and nice those clouds it is an indication that it could be really really dangerous in connection to them but the most common type of clear air turbulence is the one that is associated with jet streams now in order to understand jet streams you need to start first of all you need to pay the tension on your physics class and once again if you haven't you should definitely check out brilliant or tort okay because the jet streams or picture it like a tunnel of air that is stretching from west to east and inside of that tunnel you have air that's moving at incredible speeds as in 100 150 knots with 300 km/h these tunnels or they don't stretch for very high altitude only maybe a couple of thousand feet but they can be thousands of nautical miles long and tens to hundreds of nautical miles wide as well and when you have air that is moving at these incredible speeds inside of this little tunnel that air will be kind of rubbing up against the air outside which is not moving at at high speed and that will also cause these vortexes to happen so when we are at our planning stage we will go in and we will look at our significant weather charts that we get from the Met Office in there we will see what or where these jet streams are and whether or not they're associated with clear air turbulence now normally the clear air turbulence area is very big so we only know that there is a likelihood that we will come across it it's not sure we don't know exactly where it is this is why when you're out flying and that all of a sudden start to be bumpy than the belt come on that's because we are actually reacting to it but what we can do is we can listen to other aircraft that are out flying for so-called P reps pilot reports when they encounter turbulence they will call into a traffic controller say listen we have light to moderate turbulence at flight level 350 row 35,000 feet at this location then air traffic control can go out and tell all of the others that didn't if they weren't listening or it's coming later on into the frequency that listen there's been turbulence reported in your area we can put the belts on that way we can make sure that you guys are sitting down seat belts on and are as protected as possible okay clear air turbulence can range from very mild very light turbulence to severe turbulence in some very very rare occasions but it is caused by jet streams in most locations okay good so those are the kind of normal metrological turbulence is that you might come across now there's also something called wake turbulence and wake turbulence is a slightly different thing wake turbulence is actually caused by big large aircraft and by the Vintage vortexes okay when a large aircraft is taking out lift they do so partially by creating a high pressure on the lower part of the wing and there's a low pressure on the top of the wing now whenever you have that you will have air trying to escape from the high pressure to low pressure and that happens at the wing tips and that causes these kind of vortexes that stretches out from the wing tips you can see it sometimes when you look up and you see one of these contracts if you're close to them if you're actually flying you'll see when it's close to the aircraft that they are actually forming like tunnels and those are they vortexes now those vortexes are especially dangerous in tearing approach and during takeoff because that's when the aircraft is taking out the maximum amount of lift lower speed and that's when the vortexes are bad but they're also quite significant at altitude so a vortex from a large checked off like an Airbus 380 or a Boeing 757 they're famous for that could flick a smaller aircraft upside down and it's happened on a few occasions where some small business jets have actually been flipped over by vortexes now we we have to look out for is an air traffic control is quite good at maintaining good separation both in time and in altitude between different aircraft in order to avoid these vortexes but what they do is they fall right when a vortex has been created it starts falling behind the aircraft and it falls at a speed of about 400 miles per minute so this means that when I am flying and I see on my traffic my t caster screen that there's another aircraft that has passed my flight path about a thousand feet above and about 200 meters sorry two minutes ahead in that case I know that there's a likelihood that the vortex is from that aircraft has fallen down into my path and I can ask either for a turn or I can ask for a climb from air traffic control or something to avoid it in most cases though it's not too bad 737 it's a fairly big aircraft so what I do is I just put on the belt sign to tell people that it might be a sudden bump because they're very localized so there's it's only gonna be a short short month okay so how do we characterize the different types of turbulence or different levels of turbulence done well we have a scale ranging between light turbulence moderate severe and extreme okay and how a specific aircraft is going to react to turbulence is going to be decided by the pilots board all right so what can be moderate turbulence for a Boeing 737 could well be severe even extreme turbulence to assess now all our aircraft so not all turbulence is equal depending on the aircraft type but what you could say is that light turbulence is that kind of everyday turbulence that you might encounter when you're out flying all right new passengers you would definitely react to it say that right it's a bit turbulence today but it doesn't form any changes in pitch or altitude or heading for the aircraft itself when the aircraft is fully under control now moderate turbulence is a step up on that that's when it starts to be really bumpy that's probably when you start hearing people kind of moan or even scream sometimes inside of the cabin but still very moderate changes in both altitude attitude and heading okay and it's fully under control still but it's likely that if you know those stories that you've heard from your friends so maybe you've even told others that you had this horrible read severe bad turbulence in the flight that's likely to be moderate okay severe turbulence now with severe turbulence you're going one step up and that's when you might start to have actual problems controlling the aircraft in certain you know from time to time it's not completely out of control but from time to time you can have problems controlling the aircraft you will have changes in air speed in altitude altitude potentially not much but a little bit and you might have problems reaching out to pilot panels or even reading instruments that's severe extreme turbulence in extreme turbulence then the aircraft will be partially or completely out of control it will be tossed around like a little piece of wood inside of a storm you might encounter you know forces g-forces that actually could cause damage to the aircraft structure so extreme turbulence is very dangerous but extreme turbulence is normally only found inside of the core of really bad thunderstorms during my 18 years of flying I have never been even close to extreme turbulence I have had severe turbulence for a few seconds once but what I do come across quite regularly is light to moderate turbulence so those are the kind of levels what do we do them what do pilots do well I already mentioned that we during the planning stage we will check through our met data that we get it's gonna come with Sigma which is significant max data for the entire route that we're about to fly and that will tell us about things like for example thunderstorms in the route severe turbulence even moderate turbulence and icing we also have a significant weather chart and a significant weather chart will show us in a picture away where the jet streams are where the clear air turbulence is expected to be and things like this now as we get airborne we have a few things that we do and the first thing that we will always do with any type of turbulence it puts about song because turbulence in itself is not very dangerous right we don't see it as a dangerous thing but we do know that you the passengers need to be strapped in because if the turbulence do get bad that's how you're gonna hurt yourself by being thrown around or by you falling on top of someone else or having things falling on to you so belts on okay then we also consider reducing our speed and that's because we want to have as much margin as possible in between the high-speed stall of the aircraft and the low-speed stall of the aircraft and we also want to you know there is a specific designed speed where the turbulence will give less stress to the airframe in the case of the 737 we tend to keep 250 knots below flat over 100 and was to climb above to a flat were 100 we keep a speed of 280 knots indicated until we climb high enough for the Mach number to be significant in that case its market point seven six so 280 knots or Macchio point seven six that's when we're climbing now as we're climbing now as well with that speed seat belt sign is on if it's the turbulence or should become moderate or severe we also put the start switches on that's to provide continuous ignition to the engines so that the turbulence that might disturb the airflow coming into the engines it's not going to actually have them flame out it's very low risk of that believe me but we do it anyway and we also go into our flight management computer to the n1 limit page and we select max continuous trust that's so that we have available the full range of the engine in case the turbulence will start to decrease our airspeed we know that the engine will fold forward into the max continuous thrust which is the maximum trust that we can use for a prolonged period of time right so we're climbing away down there max the belts on start which is continuous max continuous trust is set climbing away at this speed we're also obviously talking to our traffic control listening we're you know at what level there might be less turbulence because turbulence tends to be very localized it could be really turbulent at 33,000 feet and no turbulence at all at 35,000 feet when you get up to cruise level well then it's not going to be a turbulent penetration speed anymore if we encounter severe turbulence there first of all we'll try to get out of it but if we're stuck yet say 35,000 feet it's severe turbulence now what we want to do so we want to make sure that the aircraft keeps its attitude correct and keeps its trust set all right we don't want them to be constantly moving and we don't want it to stay sits altitude because that's going to change the airspeed too much so what we do that is we go into the crews page now the crews page in the FMC is always the page that the pilot fly has hopping crews on there you will have a turbulence penetration n 1 setting that's the N 1 setting that will give safe operation for the engines sirrah disconnect the outer throttle will set that speed and then in order to not chase the altitude we will degrade the autopilot mode from altitude hold in command mode which we normally use we would choose control new steering pitch control Eastern pitch is a very simple outer pilot mode and basically what it does is it maintains the attitude that we've set if we Sept five degrees pitch drop it will maintain that put five degrees pitch down didn't maintain that or if we turn it will just keep the bank angle of the set that's what it does so in severe turbulence we set whatever attitude that we have in order to maintain the altitude approximately is gonna be at two and a half three degrees picture thrust this up and down will let the altitude vary that just to make sure that the aircraft keeps flying okay we will also have to tell air-traffic control that we are unable to maintain our altitude due to severe turbulence and then we will do whatever we can to get out of this turbulence so when does when does it become dangerous done and in what way well like I've mentioned a few times already turbulence in itself is not seen like something dangerous by us it's not dangerous for the aircraft designed for the kind of structural integrity of the aircraft unless you get into extreme turbulence inside of a cumulonimbus cloud were you being flipped over bye-bye induced turbulence by wake turbulence no the turbulence that you come across normally the danger it poses is for people that's walking around in the cabin so out of the hundreds and millions of passengers who's traveling in by air every year there's only maybe a couple of hundred or hundred to two hundred injuries every year caused by turbulence and those injuries tends to be people walking about suddenly entering turbulence and being thrown up into the roof of the aircraft hitting their head and damaging their neck or they could get hot coffee being poured over them by mistake or a trolley could fall and injure someone's leg so out of those hundreds maybe say hundred people that gets injured every year about 50% of them are coming true because the cabin crew are the ones that are always out walking around in the aisles those are most subjected to that kind of turbulence this is why we as soon as we hear of our potential severe turbulence or moderate turbulence we put the belts on and if they get bad the cabin crew are trained to return to the seats when they feel that it's not safe to continue to work but I can also lift my PA mic and call number one or cabin crew return to your seats the cabin crew will then stop what they're doing stow the trolleys stow everything sit down put the seat belts on and they will wait until I give them the clear signal to continue to work again and that's very important and something that I have responsibility of doing but also they need to take some responsibility into it but as you can see this is not when people are thinking that I'm afraid of flying because of turbulence they're thinking about the wings cracking off for the engines falling off for something like that this is not what's going to happen the aircraft will continue to fly but make sure that when it belts is on you put your seat belts on you keep it on and if you even if there's no turbulence if you're sitting in your seat you should have your seat belt loosely formed anyway so that's it guys that's what I had about turbulence if you have more questions about this continue to send in the questions below and also get into the mentor aviation app I've gotten a lot of questions through the app that has helped me to make this episode and there's loads of discussions about everything the salvation related there you can also if you have the app you can go in and you can see some of the training the training courses that I've done for example how to set up a 737 from cold and dark until it's ready to taxi or the engine failure connection or T Casavant cat three approaches go around things like that okay the way that those collections works at the moment is that they're filmed in 360 you can take your phone out and you can use your finger and you can swipe around look around in the cockpit or you can move your phone around to see the cockpit as well or if you really want to feel like you're part of the experience well then you just get a Google cardboard headset you put a phone inside and it will feel like you're sitting together with me inside of the cockpit when I'm doing these exercises that's it guys make sure that you have subscribe to the channel that you have left a like in the comments to the video and before I go I want to send a final huge thank you to my long-term sponsor brilliant org now brilliant org is a company that I'm really proud of to have part of the of the channel because I know that they will provide you with not only the knowledge that you need in order to to help you proceed through your ATPL exams or whatever exams that you might be doing which is related to physics or mathematics I also know what that they have a really good and entertaining way of doing so and if you have a huge problem that they give you then you they will help you to kind of divide it into smaller pieces and solve them individually and such you know solve the whole problem which is the way that we work in the cockpit as well this is how we attack bigger problems if we come across them in the cockpit so one of the things that I think that you guys will enjoy is checking out how a how a noise and active noise-cancelling headset actually works right have you thought about that how come a Bose like the one I'm using the Bose Pro Flight headset which it only has some some tiny little earbuds how come the day can reduce the noise so much that I can use it instead of these big ear cups now that's one of the daily problems that briam will will give to you so go in check it out the 501st of you who uses this link here below will get a full 20% off the annual fee Oh brilliant but it's completely free to check it out have an absolutely fantastic day and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 1,705,579

Keywords: Turbulence, Aircraft, Aircraft turbulence, Light turbulence, Moderate Turbulence, Severe turbulence, Extreme Turbulence, Aviation facts, Fear of flying, Fear of flight, Mentour Pilot, Mentour, Pilot life, Flight school, Fight training, Captain, Pilot job, Boeing 747, Concorde, Airbus 320, Airbus 350, Airbus 380, Cool landing, Vortex, Jet stream, Clear air turbulence, Avgeek, Cockpit, airplane turbulence, boeing 737, fight training motivation, pilot training

Id: EuLURmITq_E

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 18 2019