Aviation Management Report: Understanding and Mitigating Turbulence

This report provides a comprehensive overview of aviation turbulence, explaining its nature as an unpredictable weather phenomenon that poses significant challenges for pilots. It details the causes of turbulence, including mechanical, thermal, frontal, and wind shear, and elaborates on the different intensity levels, ranging from light to extreme turbulence. Furthermore, the report outlines possible flying strategies for mitigating turbulence, such as possessing knowledge of stalls, ensuring control over airspeed, and understanding spot landing methods. It emphasizes the importance of understanding these factors for ensuring flight safety and managing turbulence effectively. Desklib offers more solved assignments and resources for students.

Aviation Management
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What is Turbulence?
• Turbulence represents one of the most unpredictable
weather phenomenon that hold significance for pilots.
• It is basically an irregular motion of air resulting from
the eddies and the vertical currents.
• It might either throw few annoying bumps or might
hold the severity of causing structural damage or
throws the airplane out of control (Vinnichenko, 2013).
• It is associated with the thunderstorms and wind shear.

Intensity of Turbulence
• Light Turbulence: It causes slight erratic
changes in the altitude with slight
bumpiness
• Moderate Turbulence: It causes minor
changes in the altitude without any loss in
control of airplane
• Severe Turbulence: It causes abrupt and
large changes in the altitude resulting in
the large variations of the air speed with
the airplane going out of control
• Extreme Turbulence: Here the airplane is
tossed violently and becomes impossible to
control thereby resulting in structural
damage.

Causes of Turbulence:
• Mechanical Turbulence: It is caused due to the friction between air and
ground as a result of the man made obstacles and irregular terrain thereby
causing eddies and turbulences at the lower level. Its intensity however
depends on not only the strength of surface winds but also nature of surface
and the stability in air. Mountain Waves represents turbulent eddies found
downwind from the mountain ridges. They have resulted in some of the
severe turbulences associated with the mechanical agencies (Williams &
Joshi, 2013).
• Thermal Turbulence: It is caused on the summer days when the earth’s
surface gets unevenly heated by the sun. Surfaces such as sandy, rocky areas
and barren ground get heated quickly compared to the covered fields. This
results in flow of convection currents with the rising of warm air and descent
of cooler air thereby resulting in bumpy conditions for the airplanes.

…Continued
• Frontal Turbulence: The rising of warm air by sloping anterior
surface results in friction between two of the opposing air
masses thereby producing turbulence in frontal zone. This
particular turbulence is caused due the instability and moisture
content of the warm air. It becomes extremely severe when
thunderstorms develop.
• Wind Shear: It represents the change in the direction of the
wind or the wind speed over particular vertical or horizontal
distance. The atmospheric conditions for existence of wind shear
includes areas with temperature inversions, along the trough
and the lows and around the jet stream.

Possible Flying Strategies For Mitigating Turbulence
• Possessing the knowledge of the stalls in case
the airplane gets stalled during skid or slip
• Ensuring control over airspeed. This will help in
maintaining an airspeed within+/- 3 knots while
on the approach
• Possessing knowledge about the spot method of
landing

References:
• Vinnichenko, N. (2013). Turbulence in the free
atmosphere. Springer Science & Business
• Williams, P. D., & Joshi, M. M. (2013).
Intensification of winter transatlantic
aviation turbulence in response to climate
change. Nature Climate Change, 3(7), 644.