When the oceans start flooding up land from ice caps melting, good luck using a plane to GTFO.
Climate changes is getting so bad, researchers at Columbia University foresee 30 percent of flights being unable to take off by 2050. Since rising temperatures make the air less dense, heavy planes won’t be able to get enough lift to get in the air. We saw this effect earlier this year, when flights were grounded at the Phenoix airport due to high temperature.
To make planes less heavy, airlines will accept less people on board. And more competitive airline seats make for really, really expensive plane tickets. Fun!
Extra bad news for New Yorkers: researchers predict NYC’s LaGuardia will see some of the worst effects of the temperature change.
More fun airline news from The Economist:
The paper is only the latest to suggest that climate change will start to become a bigger problem for airlines. Other studies have pointed to a myriad of other issues, including more air turbulence, increased flight times because of changes to certain jet streams, and airport flooding caused by rising sea levels.
Airports and companies could improve engine performance, lengthen runways so that aircrafts get more speed and schedule more flights for cooler parts of the day, but really we humans basically fucked up everything, so things aren’t looking up.