Aviation faces hotter, stormier skies – and passengers might have to accept more disruption — SkimNews
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- Thunderstorms over southern England on a busy late-June Saturday delayed around 900 flights to and from Heathrow and Gatwick, some by up to 11 hours, with dozens more cancelled and long waits reported at airports across Europe for passengers flying into London.
- Tim Atkinson, an airline risk consultant and former pilot, warned that rapid climate change could allow all of London's airports to be knocked out simultaneously, creating what he called "a very serious risk event, such as an aircraft running out of fuel in the sky."
- Andrew Charlton of Swiss-based consultancy Aviation Advocacy countered that the worst-case scenario remains unlikely and that the industry's ability to react is strong, saying it does not top the issues that worry him most.
- The Met Office said the UK may not see more thunderstorms overall, but those that do form could be "more impactful," with higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere facing the largest increases in storm-favorable conditions as the atmosphere holds roughly 7% more moisture per degree of warming.
- Airlines are legally required to carry enough fuel to reach an alternative airport plus an extra 30 minutes of flight, and Charlton said carriers will need to load more fuel as diversions become routine — a major cost that he said will inevitably be passed to passengers.
- Heathrow and Gatwick have replaced fixed minimum spacing between arriving aircraft with systems that continually recalculate intervals based on wind speed and aircraft type, a change NATS says has significantly improved landing rates and reduced delays in high winds.
- Dubai International Airport briefly closed its runways in April 2024 after torrential rain, with more than 1,200 flights cancelled and disruption lasting two days, while Gatwick has spent tens of millions of pounds on flood mitigation after severe Christmas 2013 flooding.
- Clear-air turbulence is rising as the climate warms, and a Lufthansa flight from Austin to Frankfurt on 1 March 2023 hit "brief but severe" turbulence that forced an emergency landing in Washington DC, with seven people taken to hospital.
Why it matters: Passengers will likely pay more as airlines load extra fuel to cover increasingly common diversions from convective storms, and airports — already spending tens of millions on flood defenses after Gatwick's 2013 inundation and Dubai's 2024 shutdown — face a mounting capital bill to keep runways and access roads usable as storms intensify.
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