By: Angus Whitley
(Bloomberg) — A series of incidents in which numerous airline passengers required medical attention has brought the problem of severe in-flight turbulence to the forefront.
In recent months, flights operated by Singapore Airlines Ltd., Qatar Airways and Air Europa have experienced sudden drops in altitude, requiring passengers to be hospitalized and, in the case of Singapore, costing one person his life.
Singapore Air flight SQ321 encountered severe turbulence while entering Thai airspace at the end of May, forcing an emergency landing in Bangkok. The flight was en route from London to Singapore.
And this week, around 40 passengers were injured when an Air Europa flight en route from Madrid to Montevideo, Uruguay, encountered severe turbulence.
While the most turbulent flights are from Santiago in Chile to Santa Cruz in Bolivia, there are similarly bumpy flights all over the world, according to the Turbulli database. Flights from Tokyo top the list of the most turbulent long-haul flights.
Strong turbulence occurs when air currents with significantly different speeds collide. According to the website turbli, this typically occurs at the boundaries of jet streams, over mountains and in certain cloud storms.
For example, turbulence on the Santiago-Santa Cruz route is caused by winds blowing from the Pacific to the Atlantic, flowing almost perpendicular to the Andes. The equator is also a known region of turbulence due to strong updrafts and thunderstorm activity, turbli said. In Japan, there is strong turbulence caused by mountains and oceans.
The website Turbli created its rankings by analyzing 150,000 routes using data from British and US weather services.
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