If you're a nervous flyer, you may not want to read this.
exceedingly rare for the American commercial airline industry: According to Federal Aviation Administration , there has been only one death and no fatal crashes in the U.S. since 2009. Regardless, there's no denying that a bumpy flight can quickly stir up nerves—in some cases, even for seasoned professionals. And according to pilots, there's one type of weather they find the scariest to fly through. Read on to see what industry pros hope to avoid at all costs.
"A plane flies into a massive updraft, which you can't see on the radar at night, and it's like hitting a giant speed bump at 500 miles an hour,"."It throws everything up in the air and then down very violently. That's not the same as turbulence, which bounces everyone around for a while."Shutterstock
According to experts, updrafts can develop even when it seems like there may be fair weather to the untrained eye."[Updrafts appear] on unstable—often partly cloudy—days as, PhD, severe weather expert for The Weather Channel, explained in a 2012 interview."While pilots avoid flying through strong thunderstorms, sometimes the updrafts in the smaller clouds and showers can cause turbulent bumps.".