As a SOAR graduate I can say that I've gone from being completely unable to fly to now being able to fly pretty successfully so thank you so much Tom. The thing that still bothers me is turbulence and more specifically sustained bumpiness. Living in Denver I've become quite used to rough take offs and landings and even a bit of mid flight jostling doesn't bother me too much. However, I had to take two flights in two days on 9/11 and 9/12 this week and wanted to report my travel.
I flew from DEN --> PHL for a job interview on the afternoon of 9/11 and back the next evening on 9/12. Both flights were continuously turbulent for I'd say a good 75-80% of the flight. Going out, we had about 45 mins of total calm but the rest of the time was constant shake-bump-shake. The captain had to suspend the in flight services since it had gotten too bad to be up and about and kept apologizing for the rough ride(which I appreciate).
Coming home was the same story only a bit worse. The flight was delayed out of Philly for almost 1.5 hours due to bad weather. I figured they'd end up cancelling since I knew how bad it was in Denver too just watching the news about all the rain, flooding, and storms. Eventually though they decided to board us and we sat on the runway for another 30 mins for "ATC monitoring" or something like that. We finally did take off and about 10 mins afterwards the bumps started again. He kept the in flight service active but I'd say of the entire 3.5 hour flight, about 20 mins of it was bump free. I used the new SOAR app to track the G-forces and the most it ever went from was .88 to 1.15 and usually hovering between .92 and 1.08 which I realize is not very much at all. It was a good flight to really get me used to turbulence but I kept thinking man this is ridiculous lol. At one point I turned to the woman next to me who says she flies this route all the time and that this is the "new norm" of flying from the east coast these days...constantly bumpy. Now I usually fly to the west coast and rarely east so I'm not sure but I'm curious if there's any truth to that statement? Are flights in general just more and more bumpy these days than they used to be? How common is it to have a flight be turbulent for that long? Clearly the SOAR program has helped me tremendously because if this had been pre-SOAR I would have lost my mind lol, but I handled it pretty well but just couldn't fully sit back and relax since it was so constant. Usually it seems to subside after 2-5 mins.



