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Braydon Sorensen
Professor Maura Hahnenberger
Meteorology 1010
27 April, 2016
Weather and Airlines
Being in the Airline industry requires great understanding and familiarity with the
weather and how it can affect the day to day operations of an airplane. Airplanes can be impacted
by the subtlest of weather changes so it is important to know how to navigate through any
weather or climate situation. There are many different types of weather that impacts airlines such
as jet streams, rain, snow, sleet, hail, lighting, wind, heat, and cold. All these things need to be
considered when it comes to 50 million dollar airplanes and the lives of the people on board.
Jest streams can affect the behavior of an airplane in positive and negative ways. Before
flight the airlines have a general idea of where these jet streams are. The reason they need to be
aware of this is because it can benefit the airplane while in flight. Jet streams are all over the
globe and can stretch up to thousands of miles long and a few miles wide. This is very rare
though, most jet streams range from hundreds of feet wide to a hundreds of miles long. While in
flight, the airplane can use the jet stream to either go with the tail wind or head wind to get to
there destination faster without using much effort from the airplane. The negative impact that Jet
streams can cause is turbulence, which can create a bumpy ride. Turbulence may feel like your
being bounce around in a little cage and about to drop out of the sky, but these 50-million-dollar
aircrafts are built to withstand very bad turbulence. The wings on planes are built to have stress
bending positively and negatively. With the technology today, pilots are able to read radar data,

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weather charts, and weather reports from other aircrafts to help avoid turbulence the best they
can.
The wind can effect airplanes in many ways. One of these way that we just discussed was
jet streams. Another wind related issue that airplanes encounter is cross wind. Cross wind is
defined by Google as a wind blowing across one's direction of travel. Not all airports have winds
that line up exactly with the runway, although they do their best and study the area before
building a run way. Because the weather is constantly changing, most airports will encounter
cross wind. Cross wind occurs when there is a direction of wind that is not lined up or traveling
with the path of the runway. To compensate for crosswind, the pilot must point the nose of the
airplane towards the wind and do a technique which is called crabbing. In most cases crosswind
isnt that sever, so as a passenger you would not be able to tell it was happening.
All airplanes that are used by an airlines have been struck by lighting at least once per
year while in services. There is the fear of what would happen if your plane did get struck by
lighting. But with the technology that we had 50 years ago and today, they have made it
impossible to have a lighting strike affect the passengers or the performance of the airplane. 50
years ago, airplanes were made up of aluminum materials that are very conductive which made
the lighting enter and exit the plane safely. Since then, newer airplanes have been made of carbon
composite materials that are cost effective but also lighter and stronger. The down side to this
material is that is not conductive. When lighting strikes the carbon composite material, it can
only withstand one one-thousands of conductivity then the aluminum which causes it to burn
around seven thousand degrees. Because this wasnt working, the airlines manufactures were
able to build aluminum material that would be applied over the top of the carbon composite
material to act as the conductive aluminum shield.

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Snow and hail are two other factors that effect the aviation industry. When your
car is covered with ice and snow you can just brush off the windshield and drive off with a foot
of snow on top of your car, planes cant. Planes need to go through a process that is called
deicing. When a plane is getting deiced it is sprayed down from a tower with a glycol type
substance temporally waterproofing the plane. This will allow the plane to take off with out
having ice or snow affect the the wings and lift of the airplane.
Hail is very dangerous, not only for airplanes, but for everyone. Hail can cause physical
damage to the body of the airplane (fuselage), wings, and engines. If big enough while taking off
the large pellets of hail could break and engine, windshield, or damage the body of the airplane.
The airlines and other aviation related industries take extreme caution when it comes to hail.
The weather plays a very important role in our lifes and business, and also effects the
airlines and their day to day operations.

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Work Cited
N/a, Smithsonianchannel N/a. "When Lightning Strikes Your Airplane..." YouTube. YouTube, 07
Oct. 2013. Web. 27 Apr. 2016.
Na, DNewsChannel Na. "Does Turbulence Cause Planes To Crash?" YouTube. YouTube, 15 Apr.
2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2016.
N/a, N/a N/a. "Simple Definiton of Crosswind." Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n/a. Web.
27 Apr. 2016.