Airplanes are mechanical subjects, and machines break. This is a given. Airplanes are maintained in rigid accord with established practices, schedules, methods, and techniques. In times past, where methods have been found inadequate, new practices have taken their place. One can hardly look at an incident several decades in the past and use that for the basis of determining what goes on today.
As an aircraft mechanic and inspector, I strive very hard to achieve not only a high level of professionalism, but an exacting degree of adherence to published data, procedures, and practices. I use calibrated tools. I use only approved parts. I don't rush. I seek help where it's needed. I ask others to oversee my work and double check what I do. I have operated this way for many, many years.
As a pilot, I train not to fly the airplane under normal circumstances, but for emergencies. In a few days I'll return to the simulator for recurrent training. I won't be practicing normal approaches and landings. There won't be but a moment at any given time during each four hour session, when the airplane is operating properly. From the time I climb in and begin to start engines, we will have fires, failures, losses, etc. We'll seldom operate for more than a moment on all four engines; at least one, occasionally two will have failed. We'll have depressurizations, instrument failures, electrical losses, control failures, etc. Engines will stall, catch fire when they're started, runaway, overtemp, and flame-out. Equipment will break. We'll have one emergency after another during takeoff and landing. We'll encounter windshear. Hydraulics will fail. We'll have cargo fires. Every moment of that sim session, plus the two hour brief beforehand, and the two hour brief after, will be nothing but emergencies and working together as a crew to handle them.
Mechanical things break, and the airplane is a mechanical thing. We don't train to operate it when everything is functioning well; that much is a given. We train to handle and operate the airplane normally when things don't work; that is, when things break, we train so that we can operate the airplane as though that were routine. And, it is.
Over the course of my career I've had a number of engine failures. I've had several wings fracture. I've had landing gear fail, depressurization, loss of hydraulics. Partial and complete electrical failures. Several fires. One on board explosion. An individual in the right seat experience a heart attack. Compressor stalls, pump failures, autoflight or navigation failures. Loss of instruments. Severe icing. Brake failures. And so forth. These things happen. They do not happen routinely, but they do happen. The hallmark of a professional in the cockpit is that he or she trains in order to make the emergency into a routine, safe event. We also train and use experience to avoid situations becoming emergencies. We're not paid for the monkey skills of flying the airplane, but for judgement.
When something goes wrong, we have a procedure in place to address it. If I lose a hydraulic pump, for example, I already know in advance which checklist to use, and how to address the problem; it's already been thought out, reviewed, and practiced. Over and over. The airplane has multiple, redundant systems. If I lose one system, other systems take it's place, back up the same items, etc.
what do you do when there is a lot of turbulence (as a pilot)
what about weather up ahead, what kind of stuff do you know. can you see that in 30 mins you'll be in a bumpy patch
do you get nervous when flying through clouds.
what about water ingestion when flying through clouds.
I'll say up front that don't like flying in clouds. I never have. I've been doing this for a long time, and have even done weather modification flights in which we sought out thunderstorms to fly through...but I don't like flying when I can't see out. That goes back to the reasons I started flying, though. I began flying because I wanted to be above the earth, and be able to look down and see. (Bearing in mind that I don't like heights...a conundrum I still haven't resolved, decades later). Being in clouds somewhat negates that...as does flying the airplane. Much of what we do is instrument type flying, which involves a lot of reference to the instrument panel in order to make the airplane do what we want it to do.
With this in mind, when we fly, it really doesn't matter if we can see out or not. We could just as easily cover the windscreen with aeronautical charts and block out all the view, and the flight would progress no differently. Likewise, we can takeoff and immediately enter the cloud, and stay in the cloud all the way until landing without any adverse affects; the instruments don't know the difference. When we're flying by instruments, neither do we.
What do I do when there's a lot of turbulence? Two things. Slow down, and seek smoother air. But this really depends what I'm doing. If I'm flying passengers, my first thought is to safety, with a very close second thought to passenger comfort. A change in altitude, or altering flight path may produce a better ride. Airlines and corporate flights go to a lot of trouble to find the smoothest air...that's not always possible...it may be bumpy everywhere, but we really do try. Reports are being passed back and forth by radio between pilots and by air traffic control of turbulence and winds, and it's common to seek different altitudes or routes to produce the best ride for passengers.
When not flying passengers, I also slow down; we have turbulence penetration speeds for the protection of the airplane. Just like approaching a speed bump in a car, you want to slow down not just for comfort, but to go easy on the car. We do the same in the airplane. If we encounter turbulence, we ensure the airplane is within a prescribed speed range which allows for safe operation of the airplane. When we do this, we consider the maximum speeds as well as the minimum speeds; we want to minimize the stresses on the airplane, cargo, and passengers, but also have a healthy safey margin from stalling, too.
Other types of flying may involve frequent flight in turbulence. For many years I was involved in aerial firefighting, which required flight close to terrain and mountains in strong winds. This tends to produce severe turbulence, which was very frequent. I did that with passengers and without, depending on the aircraft and the mission...and in such cases often the mission dictated a low degree of comfort in order to get the job done. Safety was always the priority, but it could be a very rough ride. Those types of operations are very different to airline passenger flying, and you can rest assured that as a passenger, your flight crew will be working hard to find the smoothest air and make the safest flight humanly possible.
What about weather up ahead? What do we know? We know two things. We know what's forecast (and reported), based on our preflight planning. We also know what we can see on radar, along with current reports from other aircraft up ahead. Some radars include logic to predict turbulence to some degree, but radar doesn't actually see turbulence. It sees moisture, and reflects radar energy back from moisture in the atmosphere. If the moisture is being moved around in a way that an advanced radar system can determine might have turbulence, some systems can then display a best guess as to what lies ahead.
In lieu of that, we use our own judgment to look at weather on radar and determine how to go around it, over it, or where acceptable, through it. The general rule of thumb is that the heavier the precipitation (or the more the moisture), the more we avoid that particular area. That may involve a deviation around the weather, it may involve an altitude change to go over the weather, or it may involve picking our way through weather systems. Airline operations are VERY conservative when it comes to flying in weather.
This said, simply because there's moisture in the cloud, doesn't mean it's dangerous or even a rough ride. The type of weather makes all the difference, and that's a big part not only of training a pilot to be a pilot, but ongoing education and experience throughout one's career. So, when we look at the weather ahead, we're using judgment to address what we see as it appears on radar, and even as we see it out the cockpit window.
I normally fly with my radar ranged out about 100 miles or so. I keep it tilted down in cruise much of the time, and clouds or storms between the radar antenna and the ground show up in the distance. I watch them to determine if they disappear as I get closer. If they do, it means I'm well above them. If not, I scan them with the radar to determine the best course of action. Normally I won't see any weather on radar sooner than 150 miles out, and won't see a good picture of it until it's within about 80 miles. Planning is done continuously then, as we get closer to the weather, based on the picture we see. Weather is dynamic, it is constantly changing, and our plan to address it is also therefore constantly changing.
What about water ingestion, you ask? Water ingestion is seldom a problem. It's true that an ungodly amount of water could possibly cause an engine to flame out...but the truth is that it would take a LOT. When flying in rain, we turn on ignitors. If the engine flames-out, we wouldn't know it, because it relights immediately. A turbine engine is constantly alight inside, and by keeping ignition running in turbulence or heavy precipitation, the flame is prevented from going out.
A large turbofan engine is moving much of the air through the fan, not through the engine, and water won't really affect the fan. The gas generator portion of the engine, which is the "jet" portion of the engine, sees but a small portion of the airflow through the engine. Most airline engines today are called high-bypass turbofans, which means that most of the air passing through the engine actually bypasses the engine. You can think of the fan as a propeller; it's just spinning to move air. Water passing through it doesn't enter the engine where it can affect the flame or combustion process inside.
What little moisture does enter is modified as it passes through the engine...first passing through a compressor where the air temperature is increased dramatically, before it's handed over to the turbine section. Most of the airflow is there to cool the engine; very little of it is actually used for the combustion process. Moisture in the air can actually increase the thrust in some cases, as water expands 240 times when vaporized....but much of it just passes through and serves to aid the engine operation, if anything.
A bigger concern is freezing conditions, when ice forms at the fan inlet or on the turbine blades. To account for this, we use hot air from the engine, after it's been compressed inside, to heat the blades in some cases, and the inlet to the engine. This "nacelle anti-ice" serves to protect the engine and prevent damage or flame-outs. Whenever we turn it on or off, we also turn on the ignition, on the remote chance that any ice which has already formed might cause a flame-out as it breaks free or melts. In the airplane I fly, we even have lights which flash that tell us if our engine speed is inadvertantly too low to produce hot enough air for the nacelle anti-ice, and it's smart enough to know the proper engine speeds for a given altitude, and whether we are using the anti-ice or not.