Flying is about to become even more miserable

Jennie Zeiher is a frequent flyer, but she was beginning to distrust the process.

It was about 95 degrees Fahrenheit that day, June 10, in Athens, Greece, as she, her husband, and two sons boarded their flight.

Zeiher recalls their pilot announcing over the speaker that the tarmac-bound Qatar Airways plane had an electrical issue.

The doors were sealed, there was no air conditioning, and in the stiff, unmoving air, the heat inside the plane mounted.

Hours passed.

Zeiher and her 10-year-old son drank all their water. She started feeling faint, her son was crying, passengers were fanning themselves with safety pamphlets, and neither the pilot nor flight attendants had information on when they could leave.

"Everyone was up in arms," Zeiher, a 48-year-old Australian business executive, told Business Insider. "People were screaming at the flight attendants to go and get information."

Finally, after three hours and cries that someone had fainted, they deboarded.

The experience was "traumatic," Zeiher said. "That lack of control was quite hard."

A spokesperson at Qatar Airways previously told BI that the delay was due to a "technical issue," and the airline had apologized to the passengers and told them about compensation they could get under "applicable regulations." Zeiher said she never received a response to the ticket she filed. Qatar Airways didn't respond to an additional request for comment.

The incident was arguably a procedural failure. But there was more to it. Greece was experiencing an unseasonably early, severe heat wave.

The day before Zeiher's flight, British TV personality Dr. Michael Mosley was found dead on the Greek island of Symi after he went for a hike. By the end of June, five other tourists died on hikes in Greece's heat.

The extreme temperatures turned a logistical airport mishap into a potentially dangerous situation.

Summer has become a relentless barrage of heat waves, but temperatures aren't the only hazard on the rise.

The climate crisis amplifies some of the worst parts of flying — delays, bumpy rides, and possibly even ticket costs.

Flying is still safe, and it keeps getting safer. Even so, the air travel boom means more people and planes are cruising through an increasingly extreme atmosphere.

While the odds are low that you will get trapped on a hot plane or injured in violent turbulence, more incidents like this are bound to happen. On several fronts, flying is getting worse.

Turbulence is getting worse

Increasing turbulence was aviation professionals' top climate-related safety concern in a 2020 survey of more than 400 pilots, flight crew members, air traffic controllers, and other flight professionals worldwide by the World Meteorological Organization.

One of the most dangerous types is clear-air turbulence, which is much harder to predict than turbulence from storms or mountains.

"It's clear blue skies, there's no storms anywhere, and there's just this invisible turbulence that, often, the first you know about it is when you're flying through it," said Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading in the UK who's been studying turbulence for about a decade.

He's found that clear-air turbulence — especially the most severe instances of it — has already increased because rising temperatures bring more wind shear to the jet stream.

In severe turbulence, an aircraft can be momentarily out of control, passengers lift out of their seats against their seatbelts, and walking down the aisle becomes impossible. That's what happened to doctors Ade Tan and Amos Chan during their honeymoon in May.

The couple barely felt their plane starting to wobble before they were shooting toward the ceiling.

"The last thing I saw was Amos trying to put on his seatbelt, and the next thing I registered was that he was no longer in his seat," Tan previously told BI's Kwan Wei Kevin Tan.

Investigators later reported that Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 had dropped 178 feet in just four seconds due to an exceptionally rough patch of turbulence.

Tan said oxygen masks were dangling where passengers had crashed into ceiling panels, and people were lying in the aisles, some with blood on their heads. She tried to help Geoffrey Kitchen, a 73-year-old British passenger who ultimately died.

A Bangkok hospital official later said in a news conference that over 100 of the 211 passengers sustained injuries. Tan said that she suffered a cervical spine fracture and spent a week in the hospital.

Singapore Airlines did not respond to a request for comment, but the company previously posted on Facebook apologizing for the "traumatic experience" and saying it had offered $10,000 or upward of $25,000 in compensation to injured passengers, depending on their injury.

The skies could be even bumpier in the future

The North Atlantic, where planes fly between North America and Europe, had 55% more severe clear-air turbulence in 2020 than in 1979, Williams found.

By the 2060s, he predicts twice as much turbulence, or even three times as much.

While FAA data doesn't show a rise in turbulence-related injuries — there are usually less than 20 a year on US airlines flying worldwide — Williams said the data may be misleading. It only counts serious injuries that require a person to be hospitalized for over 48 hours or have hemorrhaging, broken bones, or second or third-degree burns.

Even if nobody gets hurt, more turbulence can cause more wear and tear on aircraft.

"Even light turbulence is flexing the wings up and down and stressing the airframe," Williams said, adding, "That limits the life of the aircraft."

More turbulence doesn't have to mean bumpier flights. Planes have more flexible wings than they used to, which reduces inflight jostling, and forecasting to help pilots avoid turbulence is improving.

New onboard lidar technology can also use a laser to reveal clear-air turbulence ahead. For now, it's large and expensive, but Williams hopes one day it'll be small and cheap enough for all passenger planes. It's unclear if that technology will catch up with turbulence from climate change.

Worse weather brings more delays

Some parts of our flying future aren't necessarily dangerous or scary. They're just frustrating — like delays, which will likely worsen in our warming world.

Bad weather causes about 75% of air traffic delays in the US, according to the FAA, and mounting research indicates climate change is driving more severe thunderstorms, hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires, and hail in some places. In fact, heat alone could ground 23 times more passengers by 2050 — up to 185,000 people a year — a 2020 McKinsey report projected.

In some cases, extreme heat can melt runways, like it did at a UK airport in 2022. A more common issue, though, is that extreme heat changes the calculus of takeoff. Planes must be lighter or have a longer runway to get enough lift in extremely hot air, which means that on especially hot days, airlines may have to ditch some cargo and, therefore, some revenue.

Then, there are cases like the Canadian wildfires in June 2023, which reduced visibility in the Northeast US so much that it delayed hundreds of flights.

Changing weather patterns are already increasing flight delays in Europe, according to the International Air Transport Association. The memo warns that these weather delays have "a cost impact" for airlines and travelers alike.

Even if bad weather doesn't cause delays, it can cost money. Airlines are already struggling to turn profits. The climate crisis won't help. Think of the astronomical air conditioning required to cool an airport and the planes at its gates on a hot day.

In its June global outlook, IATA wasn't shy about the issue: "The industry's profitability is still fragile, leaving meager buffers with which to absorb the rising costs of climate change and decarbonization."

Airports are likely to pass their costs on to airlines by increasing their landing fees, "which then get passed on to passengers however airlines can do it," Robert W. Mann, an airline industry consultant and former airline executive, told BI.

Buckle up and expect delays

This all means that you should brace for flying to become more annoying and possibly even scary at times.

"Passengers will need to pack patience when they board aircraft" and heed instructions about wearing seatbelts, Veronica Cote, an associate professor of aviation science at Bridgewater State University and a former pilot, told BI in an email.

Despite the complexity of aviation and the ever-changing atmosphere, Cote added, airlines still run "tens of thousands of operations daily safely."

Even before the incident in Athens, Zeiher felt anxious while flying. She doesn't like the lack of control, and takeoffs scare her. She's even experienced extreme turbulence.

Still, she's undeterred.

"I'll continue flying. I enjoy travel, so you have to," Zeiher said. "They come hand in hand."

Taylor Rains contributed reporting.