Missing Plane

The ill-fated Airbus 330 with 228 people on board was flying a route directly into the kind of monster storms that all pilots know to avoid. Other pilots reported thunderstorms, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

Still, some were huge, soaring to more than 50,000 feet, with internal aircraft-flipping gusts of more than 160 kilometres per hour and vicious cold spots that can also cause severe icing. The inside of a thunderstorm can produce what is called extreme turbulence – which bears no relation to the stomach-churning bounces that has passengers white-knuckling the arm rests.

Extreme turbulence can flip an aircraft out of control. It is defined by aviation regulators as having the potential to cause “structural damage and prolonged loss of control of the aircraft.”