Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
Speaker 1: I will be reading from a special issue of Smithsonian
Speaker 1: Magazine called America at two fifty the Revolutionary Spark. As
Speaker 1: a reminder, Radio Eye is a reading service intended for
Speaker 1: people who are blind or have other disabilities that make
Speaker 1: it difficult to read printed material. Please join me now
Speaker 1: for the first article, titled When a team of meteorologists
Speaker 1: and combat pilots set out to understand thunderstorms, They made
Speaker 1: flying safer for everyone. The sky was a very dangerous
Speaker 1: place in the early days of commercial aviation. By flying
Speaker 1: into storms to learn how they worked, these experts made
Speaker 1: air travel and weather forecasting much more predictable. By hal
Speaker 1: sunt the twenty two passengers who boarded Pennsylvania Central Airlines
Speaker 1: Flight nineteen out of Washington, d C. On August three one,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty would have had little reason to worry about
Speaker 1: arriving safely at their final destination. It had been seventeen
Speaker 1: months since the last fatal commercial airline accident in the
Speaker 1: United States, a record at the time. The flight's captain,
Speaker 1: Lowell V. Skrogens had eleven thousand hours of flying experience,
Speaker 1: more than seven times what the Federal Aviation Administration now
Speaker 1: requires for airline pilot certification and the aircraft a rugged
Speaker 1: DC III. The era's quintessential airliner, had flown in that
Speaker 1: morning from Detroit without incident. The day before, it had
Speaker 1: undergone a routine inspection of its propellers, wings, radios, and
Speaker 1: all other critical equipment. Even its interior had received a
Speaker 1: good scrub and polish. Just before two thirty p m.
Speaker 1: Flight nineteen fired up its twin eleven hundred horse power
Speaker 1: engines and began its ascent. About fifty five miles northwest
Speaker 1: in Lovettsville, Virginia, Dorothy Everhardt was tinkering in her home
Speaker 1: when suddenly, according to an incident report later compiled by
Speaker 1: the newly established Civil Aeronautics Board, she heard what she
Speaker 1: thought was lightning strike her house. Everhart shut off the
Speaker 1: electricity and stepped onto the back porch. To the west,
Speaker 1: she could see black clouds assembling over a clump of mountains.
Speaker 1: A lone airplane was headed straight into the storm. Everhart
Speaker 1: lived along a well trafficked flight route, and she was
Speaker 1: accustomed to airplanes overhead, but this plane was flying lower
Speaker 1: than most of them go. She recalled. Then a brilliant
Speaker 1: flash bleached the sky, momentarily blinding her, but she couldn't
Speaker 1: miss an awful roaring. Another Lovettsville resident, Lydia Jacobs, heard
Speaker 1: the strike too, followed by a sound resembling a scream
Speaker 1: or a siren. When Jacobs peeked out her window, she
Speaker 1: saw a streak of fire shooting across the clouds. Flight
Speaker 1: nineteen appeared to Jacob's as quote a burnt up building
Speaker 1: floating through the air. Within moments, Flight nineteen plunged to
Speaker 1: the ground and slammed into a nearby alfalfa field, where
Speaker 1: it was demolished on impact, killing everyone on board. At
Speaker 1: the time, Flight nineteen was the deadliest commercial airline accident
Speaker 1: in American history, but it was not unique. Soon after
Speaker 1: Flight nineteen, a string of fatal accidents followed. On November fourth,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty, a d C three flying from Oakland, California,
Speaker 1: to Salt Lake City, was caught in a snow storm
Speaker 1: and struck a mountain, killing all ten people on board.
Speaker 1: A month later, a DC three stalled out while trying
Speaker 1: to land in overcast and icy conditions in Chicago, killing
Speaker 1: all three crew members and seven of its thirteen passengers.
Speaker 1: On January twenty third, nineteen forty one, a d C
Speaker 1: three crashed after an aborted landing during bad weather in
Speaker 1: Saint Louis, where one passageer and one crew member died.
Speaker 1: The next month, five passengers and three crew members aboard
Speaker 1: a DC three en route to Georgia were killed while
Speaker 1: landing in rain and fog. Mechanical errors, delays, detours, and
Speaker 1: cancelations were common in those days, but no threat was
Speaker 1: greater to commercial air travel than the weather. Scientists knew
Speaker 1: that clouds could be turbulent environments, but there was little
Speaker 1: guidance for pilots about how to navigate through them, and
Speaker 1: meteorological forecasting was still a primitive science. Pilots would take
Speaker 1: off expecting smooth rides, only to stumble into dark clouds.
Speaker 1: At best, the consequences might be a misadventure through stormy
Speaker 1: skies that left passengers nauseated. In the nineteen thirties, airliners
Speaker 1: were routinely hosed down between flights. At worst, the results
Speaker 1: were catastrophic. Flight nineteen happened to be carrying Senator Ernest
Speaker 1: Lundine of Minnesota, and its and the many accidents that
Speaker 1: followed spurred American government officials In due action. In March
Speaker 1: nineteen forty one, Oklahoma Representative Jack Nichols assumed the chair
Speaker 1: of the House Select Committee to investigate air accidents. The
Speaker 1: committee investigated for the next two years, compiling a series
Speaker 1: of reports that together amounted to fifteen cubic feet of paperwork.
Speaker 1: Throughout the evidence highlighted a pervasive and exceedingly familiar natural force, thunderstorms.
Speaker 1: In fact, thunderstorms were later found to be responsible for
Speaker 1: fifty six airplane accidents between nineteen thirty eight and nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five, a staggering number considering that commercial air travel
Speaker 1: was radically curtailed in nineteen forty two to concentrate resources
Speaker 1: on the war effort. Thunderstorms were as enigmatic as they
Speaker 1: were destructive, seeming to manifest suddenly flooding towns and spawning
Speaker 1: tornadoes that ripped through America heartland. They churned violently at
Speaker 1: the Earth's surface and whipped rain and hail. Even the
Speaker 1: brightest meteorological minds barely understood them, and to begin to
Speaker 1: decipher their inner workings would require abundant and diverse data
Speaker 1: that simply eluded the capabilities of ground bound meteorologists. Precise
Speaker 1: readings of temperature, humidity, wind speed, precipitation, degrees of turbulence,
Speaker 1: and the rate at which these factors varied across space
Speaker 1: and time. And the best way to collect that data
Speaker 1: was to seek out the worst storms and, in the
Speaker 1: name of science, fly airplanes straight into them. The herculean
Speaker 1: government initiative that followed would prove to be one of
Speaker 1: the most influential scientific efforts of the twentieth century. Given
Speaker 1: an appropriately swashbuckling name, the Thunderstorm Project drew on the
Speaker 1: expertise of America's top weather scientists and the knowhow of
Speaker 1: the U. S. Army Air Forces, the U. S. Navy,
Speaker 1: the US Way Bureau, which became the National Weather Service,
Speaker 1: and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA,
Speaker 1: and it helped transform the rudimentary practice of airborne weather
Speaker 1: forecasting into a precise science of the sky. Commercial air
Speaker 1: travel was made demonstrably safer, and an untold number of
Speaker 1: lives were saved. The global economy as we know it
Speaker 1: grew from the reliability bequeathed to US. Mike Kertz, a
Speaker 1: forecaster for the National Weather Service, has described its findings
Speaker 1: as quote the quarterstone of today's understanding of thunder storms
Speaker 1: and related weather phenomena. Quote Remarkably, the project has also
Speaker 1: largely been lost to history. Quote it's not taught in
Speaker 1: college when you're going through meteorology. Kurtz told me recently.
Speaker 1: I've gone back and looked in some textbooks, and it's
Speaker 1: literally in some a footnote may be a brief paragraph.
Speaker 1: What does remain in a hoste historical record, cobbled together
Speaker 1: from incident reports, oral histories, congressional hearings, scientific publications, and
Speaker 1: interviews with contemporary storm chasers illustrates a dynamic portrait of
Speaker 1: American ingenuity. It's a story about the vast potential of
Speaker 1: government action and cooperation across civilian and military agencies. And
Speaker 1: it's a story about people for whom ignorance and hope
Speaker 1: and superstition were not an option when it came to
Speaker 1: tackling a problem that North Carolina Representative Alfred Lee Bullwinkle,
Speaker 1: among the initiative's strongest supporters on Capitol Hill, described as
Speaker 1: a quote three dimensional one of baffling complexity end quote.
Speaker 1: When in nineteen forty five, Francis Rachelderfer, chief of the U.
Speaker 1: S Weather Bureau, and as a former competitive hot air
Speaker 1: balloonist no stranger to storms, was tasked with finding the
Speaker 1: right leader for the Thunderstorm project. He knew just the
Speaker 1: man for the job. Thunderstorm's first captivated Horace Buyers in
Speaker 1: late summer nineteen twenty nine, when he was riding a
Speaker 1: train from Berkeley, California, where he had just graduated college,
Speaker 1: to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would begin graduate studies at MIT.
Speaker 1: A magnificent storm roared continuously over the Great Plains, and
Speaker 1: Buyers watched through black framed classes, mystified by the unending
Speaker 1: crackle of lightning. At MIT, Buyers studied under the Swedish
Speaker 1: meteorologist Karl Gustaf Arvid Rosby, a disciple of the Bergen School,
Speaker 1: named for the Norwegian city where its founders developed their theories.
Speaker 1: Bergen School scientists had discovered that storm systems were composed
Speaker 1: of fronts masses of cold and warm air, with predictable
Speaker 1: life cycles. Under Rossby, Buyers became one of the nation's
Speaker 1: top forecasters, and by nineteen forty he was established at
Speaker 1: the University of Chicago. During World War Two, Chicago became
Speaker 1: a hub ub for training military weather officers and Buyers
Speaker 1: impressed Richelderffer by helping develop weather training and research initiatives,
Speaker 1: including forecasting for wartime planning. Reichelderfer named Buyers the Thunderstorm
Speaker 1: Project's director by August second, nineteen forty five, before the
Speaker 1: war was even formally over. Buyer's first task was to
Speaker 1: recruit the best minds to answer a seemingly straightforward question,
Speaker 1: how did thunderstorms behave. At the time, scientists estimated a
Speaker 1: thunderstorm's size in part by observing its basic visual dimensions,
Speaker 1: that is, by its height, width, and depth, but these
Speaker 1: measurements did little to indicate how bumpy a flight through
Speaker 1: a given storm would be. Buyers set out to discern
Speaker 1: the storm's fourth dimension intensity. To understand that, Buyers and
Speaker 1: his researchers needed to decipher a storm's internal structure, so
Speaker 1: they began recruiting former World War II pilots to seek
Speaker 1: out the most dangerous parts of the sky. They would
Speaker 1: do so in p sixty one black Widow airplanes, which
Speaker 1: had been designed to fly harrowing night missions hunting down
Speaker 1: enemy bombers. Now the pilots would hunt storms, penetrate them, and,
Speaker 1: if they survived, take careful notes of what they experienced.
Speaker 1: No storm was to be avoided because it appeared too
Speaker 1: large or too violent. Roscoe Brahm, one of the project's leads,
Speaker 1: later recalled all told the Thunderstorm Project recruited eleven pilots
Speaker 1: and seven navigators for this uniquely precarious mission. Buyers and
Speaker 1: his colleagues narrowed down what they believed were the main
Speaker 1: characteristics quote reflecting the character and intensity of the thunderstorm process.
Speaker 1: Storms they wrote contained updrafts and downdrafts quote the lifeblood
Speaker 1: of the thunderstorm, although little was known of the downdraft
Speaker 1: end quote. Horizontal winds and temperature gradients, electric fields and
Speaker 1: variations in rainfall and intensity, changes in air pressure and
Speaker 1: fluctuations in wid speed at ground level, and lastly, overall
Speaker 1: levels of turbulence and gustiness. To measure these phenomena, the
Speaker 1: black widows were affixed with a suite of instruments from
Speaker 1: photographic recorders and sensitive temperature gauges to quote airborne electric
Speaker 1: fields meters end quote. But by large the most important
Speaker 1: instrument was a newish technology called radio detection and ranging,
Speaker 1: better known as radar. Radar emits radio waves that bounce
Speaker 1: off objects and reverberate back to the source, allowing scientists
Speaker 1: to calculate the distance and relative position of those objects
Speaker 1: using a returning signals, travel time, and other measurable properties.
Speaker 1: The technology had been developed in secret before World War
Speaker 1: II and had been critical in wartime planning. The British
Speaker 1: relied on radar during the Battle of Britain to detect
Speaker 1: incoming German and in nineteen forty one they discovered that
Speaker 1: they could use radar to track rain, snow, and water vapor.
Speaker 1: The next year, scientists at MIT wrote to Reichelderfer that
Speaker 1: they had used radar to identify thunderstorms from as far
Speaker 1: as one hundred and sixty miles away. By early nineteen
Speaker 1: forty four, many Army Air Forces fighters and bombers were
Speaker 1: equipped with nascent radar systems. Buyers was already well aware
Speaker 1: of radar's forecasting potential. He had helped direct a training
Speaker 1: program for wartime weather radar officers and had even mentioned
Speaker 1: the promising technology in his forthcoming meteorology textbook before he
Speaker 1: was ordered to remove it because of national security concerns.
Speaker 1: For the thunderstorm project, he believed radar would prove immediately valuable,
Speaker 1: not only for detecting storms, but as a means of
Speaker 1: triangulating the vast web of data the pilots and scientists
Speaker 1: would collect. Quote. The problem of tying all of these
Speaker 1: data together to obtain a unified picture of each thunder
Speaker 1: storm required exact radar tracking or radio direction finding in
Speaker 1: connection with planes and instruments end quote. Buyers wrote later.
Speaker 1: For that reason, in addition to ground based radar networks
Speaker 1: dispersed throughout the experiment sites, radar beacons were also housed
Speaker 1: in the noses of the black widows, so that the
Speaker 1: planes could be quote located in time and space with
Speaker 1: respect to the thunder storm end quote. Finally, to measure
Speaker 1: the lower levels of storm systems, where the planes couldn't fly,
Speaker 1: Buyers scientists would use a range of unusual instruments deployed
Speaker 1: from the ground. One was a mechanical hygrometer. Early versions
Speaker 1: resembled a violin, which measured the air's relative humidity using
Speaker 1: a strand of human hair, specifically blonde hair, which was
Speaker 1: especially reactive to humidity, expanding when an encountered moisture and
Speaker 1: contracting when the air was dry. Another was the ki tun,
Speaker 1: a balloon affixed with small kitelike panels, allowing it to
Speaker 1: stay aloft and gusty skies while measuring conditions. By early
Speaker 1: summer nineteen forty six, Buyers and his team had selected
Speaker 1: two sites for experiments. The Black Widows would first take
Speaker 1: flight later that summer over central Florida, a region known
Speaker 1: for its unusually frequent thunder storms. The following summer, operations
Speaker 1: would move to the southwestern Ohio town of Wilmington, which
Speaker 1: also reported frequent thunder storms and was close to two
Speaker 1: military air fields. In nineteen forty eight, they merged to
Speaker 1: become right Patterson Air Force Base. The only thing left
Speaker 1: to do was to await the forthcoming storm season and
Speaker 1: then fly into the belly of the beast. During the
Speaker 1: next two summers, black Widow crews an Army Air Force's
Speaker 1: pilot and a navigator, plus by nineteen forty seven a
Speaker 1: third crew member for helping with observations, made hundreds of
Speaker 1: rocky passes through storms, bouncing and shuddering through turbulence that
Speaker 1: routinely sent them rocketing or plummeting more than five hundred
Speaker 1: feet in an instant. The pilots and navigators strained not
Speaker 1: only to keep the planes level and their instruments functioning,
Speaker 1: but also to frantically note their observations, scribbling them in
Speaker 1: notebooks or speaking into tape recorders. Because Buyers and his
Speaker 1: scientists required data from multiple points within a storm, each
Speaker 1: mission involved five black Widows flying in a vertical stack
Speaker 1: formation at five thousand foot intervals. The flights could be harrowing.
Speaker 1: One August afternoon in forty seven, twenty thousand feet over
Speaker 1: southern Ohio, First Lieutenant Tom Mayon felt his eyeballs jitter
Speaker 1: in his skull as his retrofitted fighter plane was tossed
Speaker 1: around by an especially wily storm. He could just make
Speaker 1: out the time two thirty seven p m. When a
Speaker 1: gust blasted his airplane with an uppercut of such violent
Speaker 1: precision that it flipped the plane nose over tail. Standing
Speaker 1: vertically in the air, Mayon's Black Widow stalled out, and
Speaker 1: he nearly tumbled back to earth. First Lieutenant Joe T. Hargut,
Speaker 1: flying five thousand feet below him, smashed into the same
Speaker 1: turbulent wave, but rather than causing Hargot's plane to stall out,
Speaker 1: the gust transformed it into a rocket ship, exerting blood
Speaker 1: curdling g forces on the crew as they shot five
Speaker 1: thousand feet upward into the storm. In less than a minute,
Speaker 1: First Lieutenant Robert L. Smith, flying a third plane at
Speaker 1: ten thousand feet, collided with that same force and was
Speaker 1: bounced upward two thousand feet miraculously after a second engine stall,
Speaker 1: Mayon wrestled control of his airplane and guided his crew
Speaker 1: to a safe landing. The other four P sixty one's
Speaker 1: gritted their way through the mission, managing to continue recording
Speaker 1: observations through every phase of the storm. Incredibly, no one
Speaker 1: was killed during the project's two summer span. With each
Speaker 1: successive flight, a clearer picture of thunder storms emerged. The
Speaker 1: storms were not chaotic or random. They followed a particular,
Speaker 1: albeit violent life cycle. Roscoe Braham, a cloud physicist studying
Speaker 1: under buyers in Chicago and a former World War II
Speaker 1: bomber pilot himself, was critical in deciphering this cycle. With
Speaker 1: the aid of radar, which allowed him to co ordinate
Speaker 1: data collected by the planes and the ground operators, Braham
Speaker 1: identified three distinct stages of a thunderstorm's life. The cumulus stage,
Speaker 1: when its winds began to swell upward, the mature stage,
Speaker 1: when the storm was at its most fearsome, and a
Speaker 1: final stage after about thirty minutes, when the storm weakened
Speaker 1: and eventually died out. Learned to identify a storm stage,
Speaker 1: the scientists realized, and they could predict how it would behave.
Speaker 1: This led to a signature finding the ground beneath a
Speaker 1: thunderstorm experienced the most violent gales just after heavy rain
Speaker 1: began to fall, which caused winds to bounce off the
Speaker 1: Earth's surface and then spin and accelerate. The closer one
Speaker 1: was to the storm's core, the more devastating the winds.
Speaker 1: Because takeoffs and landings were and still are the most
Speaker 1: dangerous parts of flying, if airlines could be alerted that
Speaker 1: a thunderstorm was brewing near an airfield, they could delay
Speaker 1: their flights Accordingly, Buyers and Braham concluded that delaying a
Speaker 1: takeoff by even five minutes could reduce the likelihood of
Speaker 1: encountering strong turbulence, which would in turn dramatically reduce the
Speaker 1: chances of an accident. The project's analysts also discovered that
Speaker 1: pilots could adjust the sensors on their radars to pinpoint
Speaker 1: them the heaviest rainfall in a storm where turbulence was
Speaker 1: most likely. Because radar beams bounce off water droplets, pilots
Speaker 1: and researchers could locate not only the presence of oncoming storms,
Speaker 1: but also specifically where within the storm rain, hail, and
Speaker 1: ice were most prevalent. They observed that radar would send
Speaker 1: back an echo indicating the most highly concentrated areas of
Speaker 1: water within the storm. The pilots then corroborated these radar
Speaker 1: findings with their own observations of turbulence, and concluded that
Speaker 1: turbulence was often worst where rainfall was heaviest. The turbulence
Speaker 1: in a storm is caused not by rain, but by
Speaker 1: what causes rain, strong updrafts of wind. This moisture laden
Speaker 1: air then cools to form rain, which is forced back
Speaker 1: down to the ground in powerful down drafts. Much to
Speaker 1: their surprise, the scientists also learned that a thunder storm,
Speaker 1: which could cover anywhere from twenty to two hundred square miles,
Speaker 1: was not always one storm. It could comprise multiple cells,
Speaker 1: each of which might brew its own mini storm system.
Speaker 1: If a two hundred square mile storm sounded daunting to
Speaker 1: air travelers, what the scientists discovered next inspired hope. Although
Speaker 1: the cores of thunderstorms could be exceptionally rough the areas
Speaker 1: between these cells were relatively calm. This finding would allow
Speaker 1: pilots and ground operators to identify turbulent hot spots inside
Speaker 1: a storm and navigate around them with minimal disruption. What's more,
Speaker 1: it would transform night flying, as radar could reach storms
Speaker 1: in complete darkness. Buyers, Bram, and the rest of the
Speaker 1: team spent two years piecing together their findings. Probably their
Speaker 1: most significant finding pertained to radar. Quote. Radar is without question,
Speaker 1: one of the best instrument aids to thunderstorm flying currently
Speaker 1: available end quote, they wrote in their book length report
Speaker 1: released in June nineteen forty nine. With sophisticated radar and
Speaker 1: trained radar operators, they wrote, the sky could be traversed
Speaker 1: not only safely, but with a reasonable degree of predictability.
Speaker 1: The final report did not point to major revelations from
Speaker 1: the ground released instruments. Thunderstorms proved too powerful even for caytunes,
Speaker 1: as Buyers noted that overwhelming winds at lower elevations rendered
Speaker 1: any measurements quote difficult and impossible to evaluate endo. Still,
Speaker 1: one can appreciate the abuliant creative effort and experimental resourcefulness
Speaker 1: of Buyer's team and using everything at their disposal to
Speaker 1: try to wrangle the storm. Despite the project's accomplishments, its
Speaker 1: recommendations were not immediately implemented by a commercial airline industry
Speaker 1: that was rapidly expanding after the lifting of wartime travel restrictions.
Speaker 1: It would take a number of near misses and one
Speaker 1: tragedy to mark a turning point. One such near miss
Speaker 1: was a September nineteen fifty four air traffic jam so
Speaker 1: terrible that it was dubbed Black Wednesday. Three hundred airliners
Speaker 1: were stuck circling in bad weather above New York, delaying
Speaker 1: some forty five thousand passengers. Then, in June nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: two airliners crashed into each other twenty one thousand feet
Speaker 1: over the Grand Canyon, killing one hundred and twenty eight people.
Speaker 1: Investigators determined that seemingly innocuous fluffy clouds likely played a
Speaker 1: role in the pilot's inability to see each other. The
Speaker 1: incident prompted the creation of the Federal Aviation Agency now
Speaker 1: the Federal Aviation Administration, and long range radar, instrumentation and
Speaker 1: surveillance equipment to monitor air traffic were soon standardized in
Speaker 1: airports across the nation. After the thunderstorm project, Buyers returned
Speaker 1: to the University of Chicago, where he remained till nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five. The meteorologist R. H. Simpson, after whom the
Speaker 1: category based Saphir Simpson Hurricane Windscale is partially named, described
Speaker 1: Byers as quote the balance wheel in the administration of
Speaker 1: one of the greatest meteorology programs the world has ever
Speaker 1: known end quote. Among the scientists Buyer's mentored was Tetsuya
Speaker 1: ted Fujita, whom Byers recruited from Japan and who came
Speaker 1: to be known as Mister Tornado for his groundbreaking research
Speaker 1: on tornadoes. The e F scale for measuring tornado strength
Speaker 1: is named after him. Enhanced Fujita. Buyers, who finished his
Speaker 1: career overseeing the College of Geosciences at Texas A and M,
Speaker 1: retired in nineteen seventy four, but his final meteorological contribution
Speaker 1: came three years later, when he co authored a paper
Speaker 1: with Fujiita analyzing an airplane crash at New York's Kennedy
Speaker 1: Airport in June nineteen seventy five. The plane experienced quote
Speaker 1: unusually sharp wind changes under a thunder shower end quote.
Speaker 1: They wrote the result of a downburst, a phenomenon that
Speaker 1: Buyers and his scientists had never observed during the Thunderstorm Project.
Speaker 1: In the wrong conditions, Fujiita and Buyers found the ultra
Speaker 1: violet downward gust could cause an airplane to undergo an
Speaker 1: unexpected sinking, an especially dangerous problem when already flying slow
Speaker 1: and low to the ground. Such downbursts, they discovered, could
Speaker 1: be detected and thus avoided on radar in the form
Speaker 1: of rare spearhead echoes. The finding was its own kind
Speaker 1: of echo to Bayer's initial work on the Thunderstorm Project,
Speaker 1: when he and Braham improved decision making for take offs
Speaker 1: and landings. Because the method sometimes calls for delays, even
Speaker 1: short ones, when a storm is brewing to day, we
Speaker 1: may take such precautions for granted or worse, stuck on
Speaker 1: a p ttarmac awaited the all clear, perhaps pulling out
Speaker 1: our phones to track a storm threat in real time
Speaker 1: on our pocket radar devices. We rarely appreciate why such
Speaker 1: safeguards were imposed to begin with. Yet on the whole
Speaker 1: the sky can now be traversed with an exceptional level
Speaker 1: of safety. Hulking airliners fairy millions of Americans every day
Speaker 1: crossing continents and oceans with such routine consistency that commercial
Speaker 1: air travel's harrowing infancy has largely been replaced by its mundanity,
Speaker 1: the monotony of its food, the inadequate inflight entertainment, the
Speaker 1: endless waiting today. To be aloft in the sky is
Speaker 1: not merely expected, it's boring. Few people have much awareness
Speaker 1: about whom they have to thank for that. But you
Speaker 1: can find small testaments to Horace Buyers and his team
Speaker 1: if you know where to look. One is a historical
Speaker 1: marker in Saint Cloud, Florida, the site of the project's
Speaker 1: first phase of test flights. Another is in rural southwestern Ohio,
Speaker 1: the sight of the second last spring. I drove out
Speaker 1: to Wilmington, Ohio, where I found a marker tucked away
Speaker 1: on a back road across the street from a local
Speaker 1: air park, which serves as a home base for cargo
Speaker 1: carriers like UPS and Amazon Air. Coincidentally, a severe thunderstorm
Speaker 1: was forecast for that afternoon. I could see the clouds
Speaker 1: twisting and the sky beginning to darken. No sooner had
Speaker 1: I made it back to my hotel than I heard
Speaker 1: a loud rumble and crack. There was a pause as
Speaker 1: if the sky were taking in a deep breath. Then
Speaker 1: it exhaled. Winds began whipping, and rain started falling in sheets.
Speaker 1: I stepped outside for a moment. I closed my eyes
Speaker 1: and listened wooshing wind and pattering rain. But something was missing.
Speaker 1: All day, big heavy cargo planes had flown overhead, emitting
Speaker 1: a steady drum of white noise. I'd gotten used to
Speaker 1: the wine of their engines. Now a forecast had grounded
Speaker 1: all air traffic, and there wasn't a plane in the sky.
Speaker 1: This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your
Speaker 1: reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: have a great day.