Airplane pilot reveals why passengers ‘should not be scared’ of unnerving turbulence
It’s not the sign of the air-pocalypse that people think it is.
Turbulence may seem like the aircraft’s falling out of the sky — however, it’s reportedly not as dire as it feels.
A Dutch pilot made passengers rest easier after telling why people generally shouldn’t fear those bumps in the flightpath, detailing his explanation in a TikTok video with more than 3.6 million views.
“Turbulence is a natural part of flying, and it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the plane,” the unidentified flyboy assured viewers in the clip on KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ official account.
His message: that passengers, quite simply, “should not be scared.”
The catastrophic-seeming event actually occurs due to fairly innocuous “changes of the flow of air around the airplane,” he explained.
“As the airplane flies, it’s encountering different air masses with varying temperatures, with wind speeds and directions,” the pilot described. “These air masses lead to different pockets of densities, leading to turbulence.
“When the airplane flies through these pockets, it can experience certain bumps and shakes,” he said.
A United Airlines pilot named Rob Biddle also analogized the sensation to “bumps in the road when you’re driving” in a recent interview with Fox News.
While the shaking can be uncomfortable, modern planes are “designed to withstand it safely,” according to the flyboy, who added that crew members are also trained “for turbulence to assure everyone’s safety on board.”
The PSA put some internet commenters’ minds at ease.
“They should play this speech when turbulence happens,” suggested one relieved viewer, while another wrote, “I used to be terrified of flying and turbulence. Not any more. Finally I conquered it.”
“I wish more pilots would get on the speaker system & say this turbulence is only going to last for about a few minutes, or within 15 minutes we should be clear of this,” a third offered. “Rather than just let us sit.”
Even an alleged aerospace engineer weighed in, writing: “As an aerospace engineer, I can 100% confirm ur plane is incredibly unlikely to be damaged by turbulence. We take into account a lot of safety factors.”
Meanwhile, Sydney pilot and reality TV star Jimmy Nicholson even demonstrated a way of proving that even severe turbulence is a lot less extreme than it feels.
Dubbed the “water bottle test,” the trick involves flipping a water bottle upside down to show that the water wasn’t “moving much,” meaning it would’ve felt worse for passengers than the reality of the situation.
That being said, a bumpy flight can still pose hazards to passengers, especially if they’re not wearing their seatbelts or are up and walking around.
Turbulence-induced injuries are generally caused by baggage toppling out of overhead bins and hitting people in the head, passengers falling or being thrown into the sides of the cabin, or food carts ramming into flyers.
Thankfully, the likelihood of getting hurt is pretty rare.
Between 2009 to 2021, only 30 passengers and 116 crew members were seriously injured due to turbulence — a small number when one considers the millions of people who fly every year.
