This deserves to be the top comment. Turbulence accident statistics are only going to ever reflect clear air turbulence if the aircraft sustained detectable damage or passenger(s) sustain serious enough injuries.
In that case what’s the explanation for clear air turbulence events having an exactly proportionally lower rate of causing damage and injury such that the rate has remained flat despite the increase in events? What’s making turbulence safer?
Edit: this isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m very interested in any proposed actual mechanism. As someone who is very alarmed by turbulence I’d love a reason to believe it’s getting safer.
As I understand it modern US airlines (Delta in specific) employ a meteorology team tasked to predict turbulence and they also run complex turbulence tracking systems that allow one plane that detects turbulence to communicate to a centralized system that allows other planes to change altitude or heading to avoid turbulent areas when possible.
Therefore both can be true at the same time: turbulence events are increasing, but we are also getting better at predicting, avoiding, and dealing with these events.
Flight plans are now algorithmically generated to shave fuel usage.
Because weather forecasts are more accurate, the algorithms write flight plans that take the aircraft closer to storms. This saves fuel while slightly increasing the risk of severe turbulence.
Couple that with the lightweight materials used in modern aircraft, and passengers are likely to experience more frequent moderate to severe turbulence.
There's no reason there couldn't be a statistical increase in turbulence without a statistical increase in accidents if the intensity hasn't crossed a threshold for the amount of turbulence todays planes can safely sustain.
