Benefits

 The Enhanced Turbulence Radar benefits flight crews, flight attendants, passengers, flight operations, maintenance, and Air Traffic Control in several ways:

Enhanced Safety

Increased Situational Awareness

Improved Operational Efficiency

To Safety

• Reduced injuries to flight attendants and passengers due to enhanced turbulence awareness by flight crews, avoidance through flight deviations, and turbulence preparation (e.g., passengers and flight attendants seated with seatbelts fastened and loose items secured).

• Ability to accurately detect turbulence hazards to the aircraft in areas of low reflectivity (below the threshold for reflectivity display on current weather radar).

To Operations

• Increased situational awareness of turbulence hazardous to their aircraft.  This situational awareness:

• Enhances pilots’ ability to route aircraft around regions of potentially hazardous turbulence.

• Enables more judicious use of airspace and can lead to potential savings in fuel and reductions in flight delays.

• Provides ATC a better equipped pathfinder aircraft for airspace previously closed to severe weather.

To Maintenance

• Potentially less unscheduled maintenance, fewer severe loads inspections, less overall stress on the aircraft structure, and longer airframe life due to ability to avoid turbulence.