A bit of a tangent, but a comforting thought is that unusually strong turbulence counterintuitively has a beneficial effect on fatigue crack propagation. Alumin

A bit of a tangent, but a comforting thought is that unusually strong turbulence counterintuitively has a beneficial effect on fatigue crack propagation. Aluminium always has cracks and they're keep growing but a heavy load that opens up a crack plastically deforms the material around the crack tip so that its natural state is for the crack to stay open. But the rest of the structure forces it closed. Once it's in this state, subsequent smaller higher frequency loads don't apply the usual damaging tensile stress to the crack tip so it doesn't grow like it otherwise would have. Not going to stop the wings falling off on your flight though, but it might help the next guy if it's some South American airline that never maintains its planes :P