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Know What Kind of Turbulence to Expect Before Your Flight

November 9, 2010 at 11:40 AM | by | Comments (2)

In-Flight meals may not be the most sanitary things and engines may not work properly all the time, but the thing that scares us the most is turbulence. When the plane starts shaking, we close our eyes and try to go to a happy place inside our mind, where the skies are clear and smooth and we're about to land. But thanks to a tweet from flight attendant @Heather_Poole, we may able to prepare ourselves for turbulence by visiting the Turbulence Forecast.

The Turbulence Forecast is a straightforward site, which gives maps of countries or regions and layers over them with sectors where light to heavy turbulence can be expected. The map you see above shows only green sectors on the USA right now, so turbulence is light, but trust us when we say that we have seen those boxes go red (mainly over the Northeast) to distinguish more severe turbulence.

Forecasts are available up to 48 hours in advance, and there's even a section for seeing pilot reports of turbulence. To properly understand all the numbers, you may need to be a pilot, but still it helps to know that you could possibly be in for some bumps on your flight just from the map colorcoding.

Also of note to travelers is the site's Cruise Wave Heights Forecast. Okay, this just became one of our favorite sites; they need an iPhone app!

[Photo: Turbulence Forecast]

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Hint

This site is awesome. It is especially powerful when you combine it with in-flight wifi. It will calm you down faster then a valium when you can see in real time that you are just going through a big stretch of terrible turbulence.
markj on November 10, 2010 at 8:45 AM #Permalink

Prefer to be surprised

Otherwise if I knew what kind of turbulence the flight was going to have, I may not get on the plane. I like my old method of just ordering up a Chardonnay as soon as in-flight drinks service begins and then ordering more as I need it.
juliana on November 11, 2010 at 2:02 PM #Permalink

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