With severe injuries from turbulence on a recent Singapore Airlines flight, questions abound over why airplanes encounter this phenomenon and whether climate change really will make it worse.
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Air travel is safer than you might think, despite the publicity surrounding the recent Singapore Airlines incident. Here’s what’s going on to distort your perception of risk.
People have been flying airplanes for well over a century. Engineers know how to balance all the forces at play, but still aren’t exactly sure how some of the physics of flight actually works.
An aerospace engineer explains why it’s so hard to tell just how fast an airplane is really moving.
A sleep scientist explains how to maximise your chances of getting decent rest while trapped on a plane.
Over the past 60 years, the duration of flights has remained roughly the same, while passengers have been subjected to more indignities, longer waits and more cancellations.
Unlike our toilets at home, plane toilets have to ‘suck’ the waste with a vacuum system. But don’t worry, it doesn’t get released into the air.
Cloud seeding – spraying materials into clouds to increase precipitation – has been around for nearly 80 years. But only recently have scientists been able to measure how effective it really is.
The Notices to Air Mission system failed on Jan. 10, 2023, leading to thousands of canceled flights. The system is where all important safety information for pilots and dispatchers gets posted.
No, you’re not imagining it. Your body does some weird things up in the air. Here’s a guide to the common and merely embarrassing to the rare, but serious.
When something disrupts the smooth, laminar flow of high-altitude winds, your flight might get a little bumpy.
Is it true our phones are dangerous for aircraft navigation? An expert explains.
From 1968 to 1974, US airlines experienced 130 hijackings. But it was Cooper’s hijacking-as-extortion plot that captured the public’s imagination – and inspired a copycat crime wave.
All up, your risk of catching COVID on a flight is very low. But there are things you can do to lower that risk even further.
Despite the halt to the federal mask mandate for mass transit, people may still choose to protect themselves. For those who do, the type of mask and how well it fits matter.
The radio frequency at which 5G operates in the US is close to that of an important piece of aircraft equipment, called radio altimeters.
When planes fly from east to west, they are flying against a river of air called a jet stream. These air currents can make your flight longer or shorter, depending on which way you are going.
Over the approaching holidays, people around the world will want to travel to see friends and family. Getting tested for the coronavirus can make this safer, but testing alone is not a perfect answer.
The cold supply chain keeps vaccines fresh during distribution, but the current system is nowhere near large enough to distribute the billions of COVID-19 vaccines that the world needs.
Top contributors
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Professor/Head of Aviation, CQUniversity Australia
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Aviation Institute Flight Training Coordinator and Instructor, University of Nebraska Omaha
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Professor of Medicine, Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
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Commercial Pilot | GP & Aerospace Medicine Specialist | Clinical Lecturer, University of Adelaide
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Director of the NASA Iowa Space Grant Consortium, Iowa State University
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Associate Professor of Medicine, Michigan State University
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Associate Science Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation
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Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Binghamton University, State University of New York
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Professor, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century; ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, The University of Melbourne
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Professor, Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University
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Director of Public Scholarship, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis
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Professor and Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies, UMass Amherst
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Professor of Civil Infrastructure And Environmental Engineering, Khalifa University
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Postdoctoral Fellow in Virology and Immunology, University of Colorado Boulder
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Interim Director, Center for Aviation Studies, The Ohio State University
