Many people are afraid of turbulence and worry about getting on a plane. But one website, Turbli, tells them what the flight conditions are for their next trip.
Our recent article on turbulence was quite successful and confirmed to us how much people were interested in the subject because many more people than we think have some apprehension when boarding a plane and that for the vast majority of them this fear is linked to turbulence.
Turbli to know if you will encounter turbulence
I recently discovered Turbli, a site that tells you what the weather conditions will be for your next flight.
It works very simply.
You start by entering your departure and arrival airports and choose the date. Of course for reliability reasons this does not work for periods exceeding 36 hours.
You are then offered a list of matching flights and you choose your own.
No flight tomorrow at less than 36 hours so I’m trying for today…
Here I have the two Air France because the Singapore Airlines has already left. Let’s take the evening flight…
There you get a lot of information.
– The level of turbulence you can expect
– Wind speed
– The risk of thunderstorms
– Take-off and landing conditions
You also have maps to better visualize all this. You can change the date and altitude.
What are Turbli’s predictions worth?
Knowing that we may have a calm or chaotic flight is good but the information must be reliable.
The information is as reliable as weather predictions can be…so take it with all the more caution as the flight is in a certain time. When you know, moreover, that for a long flight the conditions during the flight can change significantly after departure ….
But it is the most reliable information possible at the time it is requested.
Then, as far as take-off and landing conditions are concerned, we know that on some large airports, they can vary from one runway to another. But Turbli gives you the wind for each runway…
Then you will notice that the predictions are made according to the geodesic route, in other words the direct normal trajectory. But we know that this is not always the route taken.
Firstly because, depending on the weather, the pilot will choose a route where the risk of turbulence is lower, even if it means making detours.
Then because apart from these phenomena, an aircraft may not take the geodetic route
– Depending on its number of engines and its ETOPS certification, it must remain at a certain minimum distance from an airport and therefore from the coast.
– Some areas are forbidden to fly over. For example the geodesic route between Paris and Singapore passes over Ukraine so the forecast for this flight cannot be accurate on this part of the route.
Is Turbli useful?
But the first question to ask is “what is it for?”
We have already seen that the reliability of forecasts can be discussed.
Then, what is the use of knowing in advance if you will have turbulence or not? It is an announcement that the pilot makes before departure or during the flight when necessary and it has much more reliable data.
Will you cancel your flight if you see that you will encounter significant turbulence? Maybe 0,0001% of the passengers would do it, but for the others it will only stress them in advance in an unnecessary way.
Maybe this will reassure some people and allow them to sleep better the night before?
In short, certainly useful for geeks but of questionable utility.
Bottom line
Turbli will allow the curious to get an idea of the weather and the risk of turbulence during their next flight. As to whether it’s reliable or whether it will change anything except worrying them in advance, I’ll let you make up your own mind.
PS: for the most fearful there is also an application to predict the risks of crash.
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