Lest you think air travel couldn’t possibly get more miserable, climate change is here to prove you wrong.
Just as extreme heat makes people sluggish and unproductive at best, and threatens human life at worst, it also makes flying airplanes much more difficult. Hot air is less dense than cold air, its molecules zipping around at higher speeds, meaning planes have less lift when the mercury rises. That makes it harder for them to take off and stay aloft.
Airlines and pilots will often choose to delay flights or unload passengers and luggage to shed weight from planes when the temperature climbs too high. This leads to cascading schedule disruptions across the entire system, along with passengers occasionally being trapped for hours on runways inside roasting aircraft.
It’s a problem that will only get worse as the planet warms and extreme heat of the sort blanketing the southern U.S. this summer becomes more routine. Up to 30% of all U.S. flights, on average, may be subject to weight restrictions during periods of high heat by mid-century, according to a 2017 Columbia University study. And barring a miraculous technological breakthrough, the aerospace industry has no real solution to overcome the harsh laws of physics.