Our airplane was a single-engine Bonanza, a weather-scarred veteran that we had used before. The plan was for the two less-experienced pilots to swap legs – for each to fly in turn as the other observed from the back seat – and for me to remain up front throughout. We gave ourselves a week. On the eve of the departure, we discussed where to meet the storm. It was due to hit the West Coast by morning, bringing low cloud, rain, and snow from Vancouver to San Francisco.
We considered flying north to Seattle, toward the storm’s center, where even after its passage the weather might linger. Seattle is famously good for cloud. It also offers the upslope of the Cascade Mountains, where we were likely now to be blocked by heavy icing – a deadly condition into which our airplane was not equipped to fly. The challenge for us would to find a way around such conditions, rather than through them. Moreover, the same Cascade upslope threatened to wring the wetness from the storm, leaving it to cross the western deserts in a dry and weakened form. The deserts are deserts for a reason. By flying to Seattle we might put ourselves into a corner of the continent, and after a day finish with no weather at all. The forecasts seemed uncertain. So we decided to leave the storm temporarily behind and spend the first day jumping east to Kansas City, where a smaller disturbance had stirred the clouds. There, we would reassess the map. The forecasts seemed contradictory and uncertain. We had to trust that the storm would survive its mountain crossings, reassemble, and catch up with us in a more difficult form.
At 200 miles per hour, the flight from San Francisco to Kansas City took all day. We climbed out of northern California through the storm’s bands of rain and cloud and, in search of tail winds, headed into the warm and clear skies of the Southwest. We refueled in Winslow, Arizona. Toward evening, as we crossed the Rockies, we checked by radio and found that Kansas City was reporting lowering clouds and snow, an unexpected downturn to threaten our arrival. It seemed possible now that the weather would continue to worsen and, because of ice and low ceilings, block the flight during its final stage, when our choices would be limited by lack of fuel.
We kept going but discussed an escape plan that would allow us to retreat even from retreat. Such planning is a large part of storm flying. Airplanes give pilots plenty of time to consider possible trouble, but when the trouble hits, it hits fast. Retreat then means climbing, descending, turning, or slowing to save fuel. Preparing those moves in advance – and preparing for their failure – involves a layered logic that is not difficult to understand, but it also requires that pilots confront their worst fears. Unfocused anxiety is the emotion people must avoid. Circumstances in the atmosphere combine to kill the wishful or the distracted.
After dark at 11,000 feet over Kansas we hit the weather, which opened like jaws above and below, then closed firmly around us. The clouds on the inside were pitch black. The engine sounded rough only to the imagination. The instruments glowed reassuringly in soft yellow light. The outside observer would have noticed little action: three ordinary Americans dressed in ordinary clothes, watching nearly motionless dials, talking in half-sentences about the flight, talking about politics, occasionally transmitting to air traffic control. We flew on into the night, took a frosting during the descent, broke free of the clouds about a mile from the runway on final approach, and landed with plenty of fuel in the tanks. In downtown Kansas City, where we slept, steam rose from the manhole covers. The streets looked abandoned to an Arctic winter.
Spring blew in overnight. Already by breakfast, under leaden clouds, the temperature had climbed to forty degrees, and Missourians were talking about mud. The tone was apocalyptic, as it often is when people wake up to the weather. A bookish waiter at the hotel blamed global warming. Out at the airport, the Christian pumping fuel mentioned trouble in the Middle East.
Our own interests were more immediate. Shepherded by upper winds, the Pacific storm had barely endured the climb across the mountains and had emerged onto the Wyoming plains in a mechanically weakened condition. Once there, however, it reformed and gathered strength on the southern flank of a great dome of cold Canadian air that was spanning the continent. Spinning purposefully again, the storm attached itself to that boundary – the line where the cold air met the warmer air to its south – and drifted eastward, chewing deeply into its air-mass hosts. On the scale of a continent, the map was clear. The air-mass boundary formed a single deeply curving front that extended for nearly 2,000 miles across the American heartland, from Wyoming to upstate New York. The storm swirled like a cataclysmic whirlpool along that line. To the west of its center, the counterclockwise circulation had swept the Canadian air mass far to the south, bringing cold temperatures to Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Here in Kansas City, to the east of the center, the same whirlpool circulation had generated a powerful southerly flow, forcing the winter temporarily from the streets. In other words, our gamble had paid off. The unusually warm weather in Missouri meant that a big disruption was under way.
The official weather briefing sounded shrill. The storm center was moving fast and was expected to cross the Mississippi by afternoon. Already the worst weather lay to the northeast, where the warm air aloft was overriding cold air close to the ground. We heard reports of moderate and severe turbulence, ice, and snow falling hard across the Great Lakes. The shadow of Lake Michigan promised near-blizzard conditions. Huddled over our maps, we prepared to fly into it with a 500-mile run to South Bend, Indiana. The ground rules were clear: Safety would lie in the ready retreat, but success would depend on our determination and mental flexibility. Storm flying in such an airplane is more a negotiation than a brawl. You slip through a few miles at a time, judging and probing the clouds, moving higher or lower, turning, detouring, rarely surrendering. That was all we could be sure of in advance. On the intimate scale of an airplane, the weather promises eternal complexity.
We took off over the downtown and climbed into warm gray clouds. Moisture rolled up the windshield and became a tapping rain. The weather held clouds within the clouds, with textures and discernible edges. We rode the storm easily at first. At 9,000 feet, where we leveled, the temperature held a few degrees above freezing. Occasionally we emerged into cloud chambers with floors and ceilings joined by misty columns. They must have been beautiful. Maybe they were even interesting. But an airplane does not allow for an uninvolved appreciation of the weather. For the moment we had two specific concerns – the possibility of dangerous icing at our altitude ahead, and the certainty of it already directly below. Shuddering through light turbulence, shoved by the winds, we approached the Mississippi and asked for updates on the winter now enduring beneath us. Moline, Illinois, reported low clouds, snow, and a surface temperature of only thirteen degrees. In the worst case now, retreat might require a slow run against head winds all the way back to Kansas City. The forecast called for freezing temperatures to return there by afternoon. If they returned sooner, even that retreat could be cut off.
Pilots are forever being pestered with platitudes, including that which advises them to know their limitations in order to stop short of them. But there is no reason to enter into storm flying only to give ground. And there is also such a thing as being too careful. If you give in to your fears, if you don’t push gently against them, you will turn around too soon. And the next time you fly, you will turn around sooner. Eventually you will turn around before takeoff, which is the unhappy fate of some pilots: to choose finally never to fly again.
So past the Mississippi, when we ran out of warm air, we accepted the risk and kept going. The air temperature dropped through freezing, and our wings began to ice over dangerously. Hoping only for a temporary reprieve – an increase of merely two degrees would have melted the ice – we descended to 7,000 feet and found clear air between cloud layers. Without the clouds’ sustaining moisture, the wing ice slowly evaporated. Once again, an outside observer would have noticed little. We watched the instruments. We made a mental concession to the weather and stopped anticipating our arrival in South Ben
d. It was too far ahead to matter. Deep inside the storm, we worked mile by mile.
The temperatures aloft continued to fall, just as the barometric pressure rose. A meteorologist would say we had passed north of the volatile air-mass boundary, into a dome of Arctic air. But seen from within, there wasn’t much change; the weather remained thick with cloud. Icing occasionally, maneuvering to stay between the layers, climbing once to 13,000 feet, we continued for another hour. Snow blew in through the ventilators. Somewhere over central Illinois the clouds opened for a few miles and we glimpsed a frozen strip mine, a high school, and fields colored the same whitish gray as the sky.
Chicago passed in the chattering of air traffic control. By the time the cloud layers merged, the temperature had dropped to minus five degrees, and the clouds consisted of frozen crystals that bounced harmlessly off the wings. We had won a temporary victory over the ice and could plan again for South Bend. The airport there was equipped with a standard instrument approach, a radio beam we could follow to a point 200 feet above the ground and a half-mile short of the runway. From there, we would have to see the runway to land. On the basis of the reported weather, we expected to. The South Bend approach controller greeted us as we drew near and he watched us on radar as we flew a fast descent and shot the approach. We landed in falling and blowing snow. We intended to refuel, talk through the flight, and set out again in the afternoon. The temperature registered ten degrees as we taxied slowly in. No one emerged from the hangars. We found the ground crew inside watching football. They looked up at us blankly, as if they could not imagine where we had come from. Had they asked, we would have answered, Kansas City.
Months later, armed with old weather maps from our flight, I drove to the National Weather Service’s Operations Center, in suburban Camp Springs, Maryland. The Operations Center is the collection point for weather observations nationwide. A staff meteorologist there, Paul Kocin, had agreed to go over the record of the flight with me and to make sense of my memories.
Kocin turned out to be an affable New Yorker in his thirties, neatly dressed in jeans and a checked shirt. He led me through humming rooms where banks of electronics monitored the mass of incoming observations and meteorologists worked in teams to meet the schedule of summaries, weather maps, and national-scale forecasts necessary for the regional offices. Giant TV screens flashed satellite sequences of a growing Gulf Coast storm, adding urgency to the day. At a special briefing, the sector chiefs reported in expressing concern about the storm’s overnight movements. Despite the placidity of their expressions – they yawned and slouched and doodled – it was clear to me that the meteorologists there felt a certain thrill at working on the front edge of time.
Kocin’s duties included supervising the three-hour surface analysis chart, the basic weather map from which most of the nation’s forecasts are derived. He led me to a large horizontal screen on which an electronic outline of the United States was filled with symbols representing the latest weather observations.
Rhetorically Kocin asked, ‘What’s going on here?’
He answered himself, ‘I have no idea.’
Nonetheless, after peering at the electronic chart for a few minutes, he used a pointing device to take the indication of a cold front from Arkansas and casually stretch it eastward. He said, ‘I don’t even really know what I’m looking for. I hope it’ll become obvious.’
He said that experience still plays an important role in weather work, and to show me what he meant, he pivoted to look at the satellite and radar displays. ‘Is there a squall line there? Yeah, sure is. A good one.’
As a result, he rearranged the map again, hooked the front through Nashville, and zoomed in on Ohio to study wind and pressure changes there. This sort of redefinition of the weather lasted an hour. I sat on a high upholstered stool and watched – my government in action, producing an orderly and convincing view of the sky. I sipped coffee. The operations room felt as comfortable and secure as a command bunker. It amused me to give no thought to the pilots out there in the confusion of the real world.
The next day, over a sandwich in the lunchroom, Kocin confided, ‘People around here know this about me. I try to keep it from my outside friends. It’s not so bad anymore, but I used to be a real weather-weenie.’
Politely, I acted surprised. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, in high school I started keeping temperature and pressure logs.’
I nodded sympathetically, because in recent years I myself had taken to reading Weatherwise, a magazine that promotes just such behavior.
Weatherwise is published in Washington, D.C., by a nonprofit foundation that rescues worthy periodicals. Its circulation has recently doubled to 13,000, largely due to the efforts of its young editors, the sort of fresh college graduates who take the job on a whim and discover only afterward their own fascination for the subject. They know how to satisfy their readers, offering up the earnestly informative essays the readers expect – on blocking highs, jet streams, and Doppler radars – but also digressing into the sort of surprising subjects that keep the magazine fresh. In a recent issue, for instance, they ran a cover story on the importance of ‘weather spying’ in nineteenth-century Central Asia, along with another piece on exciting careers in forensic meteorology – the plaintiff says she slipped, but was the driveway icy?
Weatherwise gets read cover to cover, then passed around. The letters to the editor are passionate. And the ads – for home weather stations, computer services, forecasting contests, conventions, and videos – are almost as interesting. ‘Watch Camille in action!’ The ads hint at a large and closeted population of weather watchers.
Weatherwise writes up the action heroes. There are, for instance, the diehards who drive against the fleeing traffic, flash press credentials at the police, and head into the center of tropical hurricanes.
The electrical explosions across the city grew more intense, yet the fury of the wind swallowed up all the sound save the car alarms whining inside the garage. Eventually even the alarms were overwhelmed by the whistling wind. Around 4 AM all hell broke loose. I have experienced severe storms with winds in excess of 75 mph, but these gusts were blowing at well over 140 mph … By now only an occasional thud – some building collapsing or losing a roof – would punctuate the noise. Windows from the surrounding buildings imploded, scattering glass everywhere. I looked down at my arm and saw blood, not knowing when I’d been cut. Putting on my reading glasses to protect my eyes, I made a mental note: next time, bring goggles.
And there is Professor T. T. Fujita, the hands-on ‘Mr Tornado,’ who has devised a tornado scale based on destruction, from the mild F-o, which knocks over chimneys and billboards, to the full-blown F-5, which is the kind of twister that surprised Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: ‘Winds greater than 261 mph. Incredible damage. Lifts strong frame houses off foundations, sweeps them away, and dashes them to pieces; debarks trees; badly damages steel-reinforced concrete structures.’
Among hard-core weather watchers, tornadoes are known affectionately as ‘beasts’ and are considered to have one clear advantage over hurricanes: Because they are localized, only hundreds of yards across, you can drive right up to them safely. During the spring spawning season, hundreds of hunters chase around the Great Plains, trying to capture one on videotape from up close. There are risks, of course. The F-4 will make projectiles, for instance, of full-sized rental cars. Nonetheless, the hunt has become so popular that at least one bad movie has been made about it, and a man in Norman, Oklahoma, calling himself Whirlwind Tours, has begun to offer two-week tornado safaris. His game hunters come from around the world.
Most weather watchers are less adventurous. They set their computers to quick-start onto the best new radar maps, and they monitor the Weather Channel with its excited sky-is-falling banter and its occasional live reports of genuine meteorological disaster. But they seem perfectly happy to stay home and measure the weather, second-guess the official forecasts, compare notes
, and quarrel over weather records.
One of the Weatherwise editors, a young man who also had a passion for baseball statistics, put it this way to me: ‘Look, the weather is important. There is a strong feeling out there that you can’t just let it pass by.’
But ‘passing by’ is precisely what the weather does.
This frustration is apparently what motivated the greatest living weather watcher, the weather historian David Ludlum, who in 1948 founded Weatherwise. Ludlum, who had earned a Princeton doctorate in conventional history, became an Army Air Corps meteorologist during World War II. For three weeks he delayed the crucial invasion of Cassino, Italy, until he could predict that the weather, would be favorable. In thanks, the Army named the invasion ‘Operation Ludlum.’ And you can still see Ludlum playing himself in the 1953 Paramount production From Cassino to Korea.
No wonder he returned from the war convinced that weather could not be ignored in the writing of history. We know about the wind’s defeat of the Spanish Armada and about Napoleon’s difficulties with the climate in Russia, but just how hot and humid were the American colonies on July 4, 1776? And what did Lincoln really feel at Gettysburg? More generally, what about New England weather during the last decade of the last century? This was the sort of question that came to obsess Ludlum. He wrote books full of answers.
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