This Is the Reason You Aren’t Feeling as Much Turbulence on Delta Flights

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Recently, Delta Air Lines met with personnel from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), who were largely stumped as to why the carrier was experiencing less turbulence year over year. Turns out, a NOAA scientist was tracking automated turbulence reports, and noticed that Delta was the only airline to show decreased encounters with higher-level turbulence in the last three years.

 

Delta’s rivals all fly through the same regions on the same days traveling to many of the same airports, but as I learned during a recent trip to the airline’s Atlanta headquarters, its unique approach to informing pilots of rough air patches has quietly made flying a lot less bumpy.

 

The reason for the increase in avoidance? Lines of code, iPads onboard and a willingness to ditch a century-old way of doing things.

 

Delta’s Flight Weather Viewer app isn’t new, but its underpinnings were recently revamped to make it more powerful than ever. Initially developed in 2015 and split across two Microsoft Surface apps (one for domestic airspace, one for global), the latest incarnation is a single app built to run on the Apple iPads available to pilots on all Delta mainline flights. I’m told that the uptake and usage is incredible, north of 80% at last check.

 

That’s particularly impressive given that its use isn’t built into basic flight training. Instead, they’re taught to use PIREPs — old-fashioned Pilot Reports. [...]

 

Read the long full article at the source.

 

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