Will Climate Change create Airline Killing Storms?

With greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise, it is clear from the laws of thermodynamics that weather storm systems will generally increase in intensity. Apart from reducing emissions, it seems that either a better method of predicting severe weather has to be developed, or we perhaps have to expect to have more incidents of aircraft damage or crashes in violent storm events.

The flight engineer – the original aircraft systems expert has long been deleted from the flight cockpit crew to save a salary and a seat, to be replaced by even more automatic systems.

SHOOT: 2 forces are at work. The attrition of money to maintain and rest aircraft as economics dries up profits. Then there is the ordinary impact of a warming atmosphere. Add energy to a system and it becomes more vigorous. So the answer ought to be yes, although in my opinion, fewer and fewer airlines will operate as energy costs remain high and disposable discretionary income declines.

clipped from www.greenmuze.com Are aircraft flying into higher energy storm systems because of the effects of climate change? If so, what can we expect in the future? Most likely, an increase in the number of damaged and perhaps crashed aircraft, although no one can say for certain. It is still not clear what happened to the Air France Flight 447 Airbus A330-200 that disappeared over the Atlantic en route to Paris, though its electronic systems indicated serious malfunctions but the root cause is not yet known. However, what is known is that there were severe storms in the area in which the aircraft was flying, with vertical wind speeds of up to 100mph (160kph). These winds had the potential to cause large vertical shear loads on an aircraft, sufficient perhaps to cause either structural damage, or to exceed the pre-programmed flight limits of the aircraft, causing software glitches and systems to fail.