Monday, December 9, 2019

Somewhat exotic but rarely plush and frequently alarming.

Funny. I was just talking about this with my mother this weekend.


Click for the thread.

I was mentioning how sophisticated air traffic control has become in the US. They hold flights before departure to prevent pile-ups at destination airports, tactical re-routing during flight to avoid turbulence, etc. There is continuous real time monitoring of weather, flyings conditions and traffic congestion at every point in the flight. I mentioned that the flight I took last week into a snow storm area was mildly turbulent and that that was the first turbulence I had experienced in perhaps nine or twelve months. Its that rare now. Flying across the south in the summer can still occasionally startle, but again it is so rare compared to earlier years.

The flight into a snowstorm in the US in 2019 contrasts to our experiences in the 1960s. You could end up circling for half an hour or more at a destination airport owing to flight receiving congestion. Our flights across the Caribbean at 20,000 feet in prop planes were frequently dramatic. Not just unsettling turbulence but drops of a few hundred feet and massive side sheers. It really concentrated your mind on durability of construction.

It is so easy to ignore how much better almost everything is today compared to just a couple of decades ago.

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