Experiencing air vacuum in flight????

Question

Anyone ever during a flight experiencing a sudden drop in altitude?
What was that?
Was told it was vacuum in atmosphere that the plane passed through?
Is that true?
Is there any instrument that can detect that or avoid that vacuum space during flight?
Dropping 10-20 meters during flight is NOT a pleasant experience..... :(

Answer 1

No it's not a vacuum. Some people call them "air pockets" but that is not a correct term either.
A sudden drop in altitude for an aircraft at cruise is usually caused by a "wind shear"
It's usually found in turbulant conditions. Where the wind relative to the wing suddenly reverses. This sudden reverse of the relative wind reduces the amount of lift that the wing is producing, & the aircraft will rapidly sink. Because it's a transient condition the relative wind comes back to the direction it was on before, & the wing starts producing the right amount of lift again, & the aircraft stops sinking.
Moderate to severe turbulance can be forecast by meteoroligists, so most of the time it can be avoided. Sometimes the weather conditions that are accompanied with moderate to severe turbulance can be seen on a stormscope, or a weathger radar on-board the aircraft, so that would be the instrument you asked about.
In large aircraft dropping 10-20 meters will have very little effect on the passengers. The ones that you really feel in your stomache are going to be in the neighbourhood of 80-90 meters.
It is usually a good idea to stay in your seat with the seatbelt fastened as much as possible, even if the seatbelt sign isn't lit.
A good sign that the captain suspects turbulance ahead is when he turns that seatbelt sign on & you know you aren't preparing to land.
There is also another type of turbulance that doesn't always show up on Radar, & that is Clear Air Turbulance, or CAT. The best way the flight crew can know if there is CAT ahead is if it is in the forecast. Often if the forecast for turbulace is light to moderate, or in a small area, then the captain may elect to fly through it anyway because the discomfort for the passengers will be minimal, & they can stay on their schedule for arrival.
But there is no vacuum in flight.

Answer 2

Theres no such thing as a vacuum in flight. If someone told you that they either lied to you or are a complete idiot.

Turbulebce is a fact of life, but it has more to do with the direction of motion of the air outside the airlane than anything else. Hot air rises...we all know that. But at some point it has to come back down, so descending air exists too. Aircraft travelling along encounter these ascending and descending air masses and you feel turbulence as a result.

There is really no instrument that can detect all turbulence, though a lot of it can be inferred through the sue of radar (i.e. theres usually a lot of turbulence inside thunderstorms, and we CAN see those so we avoid them in flight)

Answer 3

The cabin of an airplane is pressureized to about 8,000 feet above sea level. They need to do this because we would not be able to breathe if the cabin was not pressureized at 30,000 feet up in the sky. If there is a sudden drop in air pressure in the cabin, those yellow oxygen masks drop out of their containers in from the top and people put them on. But, outside the airliner there are no random air vacumes.. that is only in space.
one of the gas properties is that it expands to fill the container. there wouldnt be any vacumes, because 100% of the atmousphere is filled with some air.
There is a system that calls out "windsheer windsheer windsheer" when there is a windsheer, but that is only herd in the flight deck. it is a safety system like GPWS, but i dont think it is part of the GPWS

Answer 4

No, they are in a position to't avert "air wallet" ... I agree, they at the instant are not friendly. they seem to easily take place in storms nonetheless. here is a few good information: you will possibly no longer like it, even nonetheless it won't floor a in demand jet plane. i've got been by way of a typhoon in one in the 80s the place the wings have been bending so a strategies up and down from the turbulence that i could no longer continually see the wingtips out the abode windows. The overhead storage booths got here open, TVs fell from the ceiling, trim panels throughout got here unfastened. all of us theory we've been executed for. The plane even nonetheless lost no engines, controls, etc... and made a sparkling touchdown. God bless the engineers!

Answer 5

Most likely wind shear.
A sudden crosswind of high enough speed will cause a loss of lift and the plane will drop.
It happens.
There is no "vacuum".
Can't be seen or detected.
Just have to live through it.

Answer 6

during flight the cabin is under pressure so the outside pressure is irrelevant
if the plane is dropping it is due to air turbulance not a black hole of vacume

Answer 7

cool dude