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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Most of the recent widely publicized CAT injuries have been on long distance flights between Europe and South Asia.

One thing that’s happened in the past couple of years along that air corridor is the squeezing of flight paths out of Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, and Afghan airspace.

Planes taking more circuitous routes, giving them less options to avoid weather conditions, much of the flight over hot mountainous terrain… could be a contributing factor to increasing incidents of dangerous turbulence affecting flights, even if the conditions themselves haven’t become more common.

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Weird that this is the top-rated comment, as it's directly contradicted by the heat maps in the article, which show increases in CAT all over the globe, in many places that are not routes between Europe and South Asia.

(Also consider that the principal question the article tries to answer is not "are there more CAT incidents?" but simply "is there more CAT?")

I glanced at a few current (as of today) routes, e.g. CDG->SIN[0], which don't fly anywhere near the areas of heavy CAT noted by the heat maps. Hell, let's take a look at the flight mentioned, the LHR-SIN SQ321[1], where a passenger died in may (though, as the article notes, it was later determined not to be CAT): that one doesn't fly through any high-CAT areas (and in fact does fly through Russian airspace).

> giving them less options to avoid weather conditions

The entire characterization of CAT is that it is unavoidable because the cause often doesn't have all that much to do with weather conditions, and even when it does, you don't get (enough) advance warning.

[0] https://www.flightstats.com/v2/flight-tracker/SQ/335?year=20...

[1] https://www.flightstats.com/v2/flight-tracker/SQ/321?year=20...

> Weird that this is the top-rated comment,

The reason it is top-rated is because it sounds extremely reasonable. This is enough for most people.

I am not judging on whether the comment is correct or not, just answering why it is top-rated. I find nothing weird about it.

Doesn't a comment automatically rise to the top if there's lots of discussion below it?

I've read something more of the opposite before: posts with lots of comments risk being down weighted unless they've received a lot of upvotes. Supposedly something to do with wanting to avoid lower value content which is attracting a large amount of discussion anyways.

I've never heard of anything of this nature regarding comments though.

Their down weighted method is odd.

It causes stories to essentially die. I saw one get upvotes which turned into going lower down the list until it fell off.

Paste the post id after id=

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=

I don't think the comment sounds unreasonable, and I don't find anything weird about the words in the comment itself. It just kinda bums me out that so many people must come here and comment and upvote comments without even reading or skimming the first few paragraphs of the article. This isn't news to me, of course; I've been a frequent HN reader for over a decade now. But it still bums me out.

Welcome to our entire species. We can blame evolution for pretty much everything.

"Most of the recent widely publicized CAT injuries have been on long distance flights between Europe and South Asia."

OK but you'll need a citation for your assertion and that is only about reported CAT via media sources and not what the article is on about - CAT events worldwide.

The article invokes evidence across the entire planet and cites Prosser et al with 1979 vs 2020 graphics, evidence and discussion. It also concludes that jet streams are where CAT events are intensifying.

The article exists because of several recent high profile CAT incidents.

It cites data from several years ago (before the recent spate of stories) that only talks about increases in CAT-conducive conditions, but says nothing about increases in actual incidents. The article leaves maybe the impression that any recent spike in high profile turbulence events might be a result of the changes in jet stream activity but doesn’t actually provide much justification for that. Other posts on this thread point out that there was no actual increase in reported CAT encounters that correlates with the proposed mechanism so… unclear if the article’s data says much if anything about recent media-reported CAT events.

> The article exists because of several recent high profile CAT incidents.

Yes, but the article doesn't claim your narrowing of the scope, that it's mostly just between Europe and Asia.

Where did he claim this?

> Most of the recent widely publicized CAT injuries have been on long distance flights between Europe and South Asia.

> Planes taking more circuitous routes ... could be a contributing factor to increasing incidents of dangerous turbulence affecting flights

The whole point of the argument was that changes to routing in the part of the world was contributing to the increases we're seeing. Back the fact that we're seeing increases all over the world suggests that we'd also see increases in Europe/South Asia even without the current conflicts. Therefore it seems like a distraction from the real mystery to focus on it.

Edit: I just realized that the chart is increase of probability between 1979 and 2020, so to modify my comment I’ll just say that it wasn’t just that geographic region that saw an increase. It seemed to correlate with the jet streams

Well the study in the link has a chart of some sort of duration weighted probability of CAT (which somehow ranges from 0 to 2.5 instead of 0 to 1?), which would correct for the total volume of flights because it’s a ratio. It’s more likely that the jet streams are getting more turbulent due to climate change.

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