How can planes fly through hurricanes

This makes flying over a hurricane actually quite safe. Speaking of thunderstorms, how are they compared to hurricanes when it comes to flying safely and successfully? When any type of storm occurs, flying can become a little more complex. This is mainly because air routes can get closed, flights get delayed or even cancelled, and holding patterns are sometimes established. If they occur between the takeoff and landing spots, they can really be a problem, although they do tend to pass through areas rather quickly.

Hurricanes, however, are a lot different than thunderstorms. For example, hurricanes are much more massive and can span thousands of miles. Hurricanes are massive, spanning hundreds or thousands of miles and affecting flights on a regional scale. While a thunderstorm may develop and move through an area quickly, the effects of a hurricane linger for days. Airports directly affected by a hurricane will close for obvious reasons, often for days. Airport closures due to hunderstorms tend to be much shorter.

But what happens to all the flights that need to travel through a thunderstorm or a hurricane? First, airlines treat thunderstorms differently from hurricanes for flight-planning purposes. The structure of a thunderstorm is drastically different from that of a hurricane. Thunderstorms and hurricanes are both convective in nature, but in different ways.

Thunderstorms create massive cloud structures with tops that can reach over 60, feet, well above the cruising altitude of commercial airplanes, while hurricanes typically do not. Using their onboard weather radar or guidance from air traffic controllers, pilots will always navigate around thunderstorms — or simply turn around. Hurricanes, however, are not always as disruptive to flights as a thunderstorm can be.

This enables airlines to file flight plans that actually operate over parts of a hurricane. For obvious reasons, no commercial aircraft is ever going to penetrate the eyewall of a hurricane. We leave that distinct honor to the brave men and women on board hurricane-hunter aircraft of the US Air Force and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As you get further away from the eye of the hurricane, though, flight conditions become more and more manageable.

Aircraft like the Airbus A and Boeing NG which debuted in and is not to be confused with its grounded successor, the Max have decades of service and millions of flights. There have been fatal accidents on each but the number is low.

Newer aircraft such as the B and A and A have had no accidents. The B, A and A have had very, very few. As a general rule, each generation of airliners is safer, more comfortable and more capable than previous ones due to lessons learned.

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