Smoother rides for Delta passengers

Some Delta Air Lines passengers are enjoying smoother rides these days thanks to a new app for pilots.

Developed in conjunction with US defense contractor Basic Commerce and Industries, the app should help take a bite out of turbulence encounters shown by long-term data from the US National Transportation Safety Board to be the leading cause of serious passenger injuries.

To underscore the often out-of-the–blue viciousness of some turbulence, the NTSB says the phenomenon accounted for just 3 percent of all weather-related accidents between 2000 and 2011 but still seriously hurt more passengers than any other type of accident.

One case-in-point is the August 12, 2016, encounter with rough air by JetBlue Flight 429. The A320 was headed from Boston to Sacramento when turbulence hit hard. The aircraft diverted to land at Rapid City, South Dakota, where 24 passengers were hospitalized. One compared the experience to a “bad dream” while another told CNN people were “flying out of their seat belts and hitting their heads on the ceiling; it was very scary”.

Not only does turbulence exact a human toll, but it costs the airlines plenty: $100 million for US airlines every year, much of it in maintenance bills.

The Delta/BCI application isn’t for passenger consumption, tt’s purely for pilots. A blog post on the Delta News Hub says it “allows pilots to plug in their flight plan and view where turbulence is and how it’s being encountered.” The display is depicted on a 3-D, color-coded map.

Enabling the application are algorithms developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research derived from data from sensors on more than 300 aircraft.

The process entailed combining vertical accelerometer readings with things like pitch, roll and wind speed. Taken together, they paint a picture that’s sometimes a must to avoid. That picture is fed back into forecast models

Delta says the app “customizes” the data by aircraft type. Different aircraft respond in different ways to turbulence. The ride you get in a 737 may be decidedly different than one in a larger A330—the flagship of Delta’s intercontinental fleet.

And how are the people at the front of the plane adapting to app?   First Officer (co-pilot) Jason Rice labels it “the most incredible enhancement to en-route situational awareness since the glass cockpit (electronic, digital displays in lieu of older analog ‘round-gauge’ dials).

“The forecasts are accurate, the reports objective and indicative of actual conditions,’ he says.

Delta has already installed the turbulence-reporting algorithm on its Boeing 737s and wide body 767s, and has plans to cover international flights soon when it adds the app to its Boeing 777s and Airbus A330s.