YaleClimateConnections: "Why you might get bumped from a flight during a heat wave." It comes down to this central tenet: The future is not going to look like the present. "As the climate warms, some airplanes may need to carry fewer passengers or less cargo." As you walk by the front of a jet engine as you embark on a flight, the finely machined turbine blades are obvious. The entering air is compressed by the turbine + then mixed with fuel in the combustion chamber + ejected at high velocity. The mass of the air plus fuel is critical. "On hot days, air is less dense, and it’s harder for the engines to do their job." The options are a longer runway to gather enough speed, or to carry less weight to speed up faster. “On extreme hot days, even today and in the recent past, this type of weight restriction has been applied. But we are forecasting that this will get significantly more frequent, more common in the future,” Jonny Williams, a researcher at the University of Reading investigated how global warming will affect the Airbus A320 jet at 30 European airports in coming decades. He found that many airports have long enough runways for the planes to take off on hot days, but at airports with shorter runways, like Rome’s Ciampino airport, the jets may need to reduce weight more often in summer. He summarizes, "“As a society, we are very heavily reliant on the aviation industry, from everything from our holidays to carrying freight to, you know, putting out wildfires … so it’s really important to engage with this now.” Let me reiterate: The future is not going to look like the present.
