By Stuart Fox, Director Flight and Technical Operations.
Multiple injuries on Delta flight DL56, which encountered severe turbulence enroute to Amsterdam from Salt Lake City last month, highlight the risks of turbulence. And passengers have taken note. An IATA survey this April highlighted that 54% of passengers are more concerned about turbulence than they were last year.
Fortunately, such severe incidents are rare. Millions of flights take place each year without incident. Nevertheless, the aviation community knows that in those few rare cases the risks are significant for passengers and for crew. And the impact of such incidents includes delays, diversions, and aircraft damage. So, solutions to mitigate turbulence incidents are in everyone’s interests.
The most important goal is to avoid turbulence where possible. We all want flights that are safer and more comfortable. While there is no guaranteed way to do this, sharing data on turbulence incidents among airlines in real-time offers some promising prospects.
Quite simply, the more data we have on turbulence incidents, the better we can equip dispatchers and flight crews to avoid or manage the impact of turbulence on the day of operation. And as we collect this data over time, we will see patterns that can help us to understand areas more prone to turbulence and eventually how these might be changing.
The industry’s focus is on clear-air turbulence: highly dynamic movements of air masses invisible to the pilot and most likely to be encountered during flight. While flight crews and dispatchers receive some insights from weather reports, the changing nature of clear-air turbulence makes it difficult to know with any certainty how it may affect a flight.
With this in mind, IATA launched Turbulence Aware in 2018. Today, 28 airlines across 2,800 aircraft feed live reports of turbulence into the platform. This aggregated data is then shared almost instantaneously with the airlines, providing pilots with a near real-time view of turbulence ahead of their aircraft.
While this information is not a fail-safe, it equips pilots with information to take mitigating action—whether it is suspending meal service, putting on the seat belt sign or rerouting the flight where possible.
As more airlines join the program, the better the data we can provide to airlines. In the first six months of 2025, airlines participating in Turbulence Aware generated 24.8 million turbulence reports, a significant 23% increase over the same period in 2024. With five airlines joining in 2025 and more to follow, we expect a further improvement in the number of turbulence reports, particularly in parts of the world where we currently have less coverage, such as Africa.
While real-time data is proving invaluable to pilots, the ability to predict how meteorological conditions—of which turbulence is key—is changing ahead of the aircraft would be the obvious next step.
We are working with airlines and other partners to see how we can use the data from Turbulence Aware, together with AI tools, to develop accurate, near-time predictions of turbulence.
While today we cannot say with certainty whether turbulence is increasing or evolving, the industry has the data and tools to help airlines understand and manage the impact of turbulence, making it safer and more comfortable for everyone onboard.
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