Following the recent catastrophic altitude loss experienced by a Singapore Airlines flight over the Bay of Bengal, a veteran commercial pilot has said the bay, in the northeast of the Indian Ocean between the Indian subcontinent and the Indochinese peninsula, is a known hot spot for extreme air turbulence.
David Evans was one of the pilots who successfully landed Qantas Flight QF32 in 2010 after the jumbo Airbus A380 (the largest commercial aircraft in the world at the time) suffered engine failure just minutes after take-off from Singapore Changi. He has nearly 40 years of experience flying routes between London, Singapore and Australia.
Reported by Travel Weekly Asia, Evans notes that the airspace over the Bay of Bengal is vulnerable to challenging conditions created by the meeting of trade winds, particularly in the current season. “This time of year, the Inter-tropic Convergence Zone, or ITZ, is very active,” Evans said. “That’s a fancy aviation name for the monsoon. Those ancient trade winds collide somewhere close to the equator. That collision line is the ITZ, and it moves north or south of the equator depending on the season.”
Trade winds are the prevailing air currents that blow from the subtropics to the equator, used by sea explorers and traders to discover territories and transport goods. When opposing winds converge however, the movement in the atmosphere becomes unpredictable and unstable, meaning that anyone on board an aircraft could find themselves on “a bumpy ride if you’re flying near them”.
Turbulence may be getting worse with global warming, according to scientists. It is usually categorised as light, moderate, severe, and extreme, and can often be detected by weather radar but a form of the phenomenon known as Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) is harder to deal with as it does not show up on flight equipment. Some commentators have speculated that the extreme turbulence that hit Singapore Airlines Flight SQ321 on 20 May 2024, killing a British man and causing injuries to dozens of other passengers could have been down to CAT.
But Mark Hofmeyer, a practising pilot and vice president of the Australian International Pilots Association, has dismissed the idea. “Clear air turbulence is normally associated with a jet stream, a really strong core of air,” he said. “You don’t get many jet streams around the equator, which is where this happened. What you have up there though, is you get really big storms. Big puffy clouds, lots of air moving up, lots of air moving down, big thunderstorms.”
