Pilots often use their communications radios to report turbulence to ATC, and ATC keeps track of where the turbulence is reported, and relays this information to other aircraft pilots who request it. The Ride Reporter application uses the iPhone's built-in accelerometers as a kind of "seismograph" to measure and record turbulence and as well as its location. Instead of subjective measurements -- "smooth", "light", "moderate", "severe" and "extreme" -- pilots would be able to report actual measurements as shown on the iPhone's screen. Ride Reporter would also show historical turbulence information, to replace estimates such as "intermittent" "occasional" and "continuous." The turbulence information is passed over the plane's WiFi network to a central server which collects, analyzes, and aggregates the turbulence reports, and relays the information to other aircraft. This application will require GPS for location information, since there are no cell towers aloft to use for triangulation. Furthermore, it will require WiFi internet access on the aircraft. Maybe we'll have these later this year. Please leave your comments here  In this example, we see three reports of "light" turbulence in yellow, two reports of "smooth ride" in green, and one report of "moderate" in red. The downward arrow for the moderate turbulence at 370 indicates "in the descent" and the upward arrow at 270 indicates "in the climb". Rectangular reports mean "continuous", circular mean "occassional", and the narrow oval means "intermittent" The horizontal lines at each flight level indicate the turbulence expected at that altitude: green for smooth, yellow for light, red for moderate, and magenta for severe or extreme. If there are no reports, the line is white. The vertical lines indicate distance in nm. |