PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - AA 757 loses 7500ft in turbulence encounter
Old 12th Sep 2014, 18:36
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poorjohn
 
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No offense but who and why would write this 'report'? And what exactly would be in this report?
This is best answered by a poster up-tread who actually does such research for a living and seems to have gotten some funding after a couple of years of asking.

If this was directed to me as OP: I assume that either the FAA or NASA would grant funding to a university with the right atmospheric weather skills (perhaps involving NOAA?).

Neither agency has funding to spare these days, and one poster suggested the thought was chicken-little-sky-is-falling nonsense. Any organization asked to pony up some money would have to consider that possibility but could start with a relatively inexpensive overview.

The effort would probably revisit and update the previous work that established how nasty the atmosphere could be expected to be and therefore how strong our aero vehicles needed to be to provide the one-in-x-billion max failure rate everyone on board expects to enjoy.

Fortunately it seems that we're nowhere near wings tearing off - the guys who look at the growing body of telemetered flight data can agree - but the concern in this thread is about uncontrollable departure from flight path in ever-more-crowded airspace, so the study would certainly be expected to quantify that problem too. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that's never been studied as a threat.

So far all we have is anecdote so Chicken Little is certainly a possibility. Anecdotally, turbulence seems to injure persons (usually FAs) about once a week, compared to 'very, very seldom' in the past. I personally don't remember a previous severe-turbulence-induced (rendering crew unable to navigate off the centerline) altitude excursion like this one. (Another ~3k bust also recently mentioned.) Maybe it's just the AvHerald effect, and ignorance is really bliss.
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