Flight segment by flight segment, airline pilots are committed to the safety of every flight. Each segment is ripe with a minefield of threats. These threats primarily occur in four flavors and are encapsulated in the FAA’s PAVE acronym i.e., pilot (personal), aircraft (technical), environmental (e.g., weather) and external pressures. Pilots exercising sound judgement, crew resource management (CRM), and threat and error management (TEM), greatly mitigate the risks associated with flight operations.
While the safe transport of passengers and cargo is paramount in the air-transportation industry, the overall comfort of passengers is an important consideration for passenger airline pilots. From passenger comfort standpoint, weather is, without doubt, a significant factor. For instance, flight attendants often request passengers to close the window shades prior to disembarking the aircraft to prevent the cabin from overheating on a hot summer day. Pilots avoid thunderstorms, request PIREPs from ATC, alter flight routes, altitudes, and speeds to improve the safety margins and promote passenger comfort.
Turbulence forecasting and avoidance has plagued the air-transportation industry for decades. As recently as 21 May 2024, Singapore Airlines Flight 321 from London Heathrow (EGLL) to Singapore (WSSS) encountered severe turbulence while cruising at 37,000 ft. and unfortunately resulted in a fatality and over 100 injuries (including over 30 serious injuries that required hospitalization). The inventor of SkyPath®, Oran Hampel articulated the challenges of turbulence detection and forecasting:
“The major difference between turbulence and other in-flight safety issues is its unpredictability. Generally speaking, commercial aviation is a conservative industry. For every threat, the industry will come up with a sensor or system to deal with the issue. For convective activity (mainly CB), we have onboard weather radar. For terrain avoidance, we have EGPWS. For conflicting traffic, we rely on TCAS, and so on. Turbulence is different. Apart from turbulence associated with convective activity, there is no sensor that can detect turbulence and enable the crew to avoid the hazard. Furthermore, weather charts, SIGMETs, and forecasts generally lack the necessary accuracy to serve as a tactical tool”.
In meteorology, weather phenomena are classified based on their scales of motion, and the quality of the weather forecast is influenced by the spatial resolution of a weather-forecast model. For instance, a global weather-forecast model with approximately a 10km grid resolution will struggle to accurately resolve a thunderstorm. High-resolution weather models at a 4km grid can resolve a thunderstorm but is computationally expensive to deploy on a global scale. Accurate turbulence forecasting requires much higher model grid resolution. Therefore, turbulent scales of motion are difficult to capture in numerical weather-forecast models. SkyPath created a product to bridge the gap in accurate turbulence forecasting by incorporating a crowdsource-based platform. SkyPath ingests data from accelerometers in iPads being used as electronic flight bags (EFBs) by pilots, Pilot Reports (PIREPs), ADS-B data, and atmospheric turbulence measurements using eddy dissipation rate (EDR) data.
SkyPath’s turbulence algorithm is calibrated for aircraft size. Therefore, the severity of the turbulence a pilot receives on their EFB aps such as FlightDeck Pro® or ForeFlight® may be directly used as a tactical tool like weather radar or satellite imagery to avoid areas of turbulence. As Oran Hampel suggests, pilots can now request deviations around turbulent air pockets in a manner identical to thunderstorm avoidance. Pilots should however be cautious about navigating in areas without SkyPath turbulence reports. One of the limitations of crowdsourcing are areas and altitudes without significant air traffic. For instance, SkyPath works very well over the North Atlantic track (NAT), East/West Coast of the U.S. and West Atlantic (WAT) tracks, and terminal areas of major airports. Areas devoid of data may be treated as a “radar blind alley” and pilots should incorporate other sources of turbulence information, such as satellite data and SIGMETS, to safely traverse the sometimes unfriendly skies.
