An Ocean of Air

by Gabrielle Walker

  The energy that feeds tropical storms comes from the water they suck up from the sea, but that constant circling is why they can keep their fierce destructive energy for such long periods. Like an ice skater pulling in her arms to spin more quickly, the air closest to the calm, low-pressure center is the fastest. The "eye" of a storm is usually surrounded by the strongest winds, circling desperately, unable to make that final leap into the center.

  Hurricanes, the most powerful storms in the world, are found in the lowest latitudes, where the trade winds blow. Without copious amounts of warm water to feed them they can't exist, which is why you get hurricanes only in the tropics. They don't happen very often, and then only in the warmest season of the year. Also, they're smaller, tighter, and shorter-lived than the loose-limbed storms that roll chaotically around the middle latitudes.

  So although hurricanes are dramatic as well as destructive, they are not the main engines of climate. Instead, most of the vital work of transferring energy between tropics and poles takes place in the middle latitudes. These are giant collision zones, where cold polar air clashes up against warm tropical air and the energy released makes storms that roll around the world like ball bearings.

  This is the region that matters for our atmosphere's distribution system. It is also the only part of the circulation system that bears Ferrel's name. Drawing together all his findings, Ferrel had pictured an atmo sphere containing three giant loops in each hemisphere. The first stretched from the equator to the tropics and was as George Hadley had described it; hence it was called a Hadley cell. The third went from the middle latitudes to the poles and also worked because of direct differences in the amount of heat energy the air received, so that was also a Hadley cell. The one in the middle worked the opposite way around, and formed only in response to the other two. This is often called the Ferrel cell.

  This three-cell picture of the atmosphere is still taught in many schools, but it's not quite right. The Hadley cell near the equator certainly exists, and so does the one at the poles (though it's much weaker). But in between, there really isn't a neat cell at all; instead it's a messy confusion of whirling storms and weather systems. However, this is the meaty part of the atmospheric motions, the place that does most of the work. That's why the westerlies are so much fiercer than the trades, and why Columbus encountered that Valentine's Day storm that nearly cost him his life; they occur in the exact region where stormy weather fronts are whipping up their climatic energy and then passing it on.

  It's also why mid-latitude weather is so unpredictable. If you live in Hawaii, in the path of the trade winds, gentle breezes will blow from the east almost every day of the year. But for those us of who live in middle latitudes, right underneath Ferrel's rolling storms and circling weather fronts, the weather can come from almost anywhere. (Mark Twain put this beautifully, in a forecast he made for a typical New England day: "Probably nor'east to sou'west winds, varying to the southard and westard and easterd, and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes with thunder and lightning.")

  But there was a missing piece to this puzzle, one that even the great Ferrel didn't see. He didn't know it, but his two major explanations, the presence of the westerlies and the spinning of storms, were intimately related.

  Ferrel had thought the surface westerlies were probably balanced by similar-strength but opposite "easterlies" aloft. In this, he was wrong. The westerlies are merely the trailing skirts of a more dramatic and much more violent wind whose existence nobody on Earth suspected. Even a sky that seems blue and empty sometimes holds a river of air even stronger than a hurricane. This is the agency that guides the spinning cyclones of the middle latitudes with a high invisible hand, and is the final ingredient for how air spreads out its life-giving heat and rain.

  This three-cell picture of the atmosphere explains the directions of the trade winds

  and westerlies, though the middle "Ferrel" cell is in fact a stormy complex region

  where warm air clashes with cold to transfer heat energy from the equator to the poles.

  ***

  JULY 19, 1933

  Alone in the cockpit of the Winnie Mae, Wiley Post contemplated the dense bank of cloud below him. He'd always known that Siberia would be the most dangerous part of his attempt to fly solo around the world. Its high peaks were usually hidden in fog, and the wildly inaccurate Soviet maps were of no help. Wiley had learned that lesson two years earlier, when they all but led him into the side of a Siberian mountain. That was on his first round-the-world flight, when he'd had a navigator helping him. This time he was flying alone and half blind. (A white cotton patch was tied, as usual, over the socket where his left eye should have been.)

  He also knew that there were plenty of people who would be perfectly happy if he didn't return. Post may have been a genius at flying—someone once said of him that "he doesn't fly the plane, he wears it"—but that was nothing compared with his talent for making enemies. Whether because of his poor background, his short stature, or just the kind of personality that assumes the world is out to get you, Post complained at and harassed and flew into tempers with even the people who were trying to help him. He had so antagonized the pressmen that one cameraman reportedly told him he wasn't out on the runway to get pictures of the takeoff. Rather, he was hoping that Post's plane would crack up and he could "get a picture of you frying on both sides." Apparently, he wasn't joking.

  Fortunately, Post had learned another lesson from his previous Siberian flight. To avoid trouble, he could simply fly high. You weren't supposed to be able to fly at twenty thousand feet without oxygen, but Post had discovered he could manage it if he didn't stay too long. Besides, there was something else he wanted to check. Back in 1931 on the first round-the-world trip, when he and his navigator had taken their craft up into the clear blue sky above those dangerous clouds, they had encountered a sudden tailwind so strong that their speed had increased by one hundred miles per hour.

  Post was convinced that the airplane would be the transport of the future, and that long-distance flights would be the key to their success. Why bother spending five days on a ship to Europe if you could be there in only a few hours? However, there were still many skeptics, for whom planes remained little more than a curiosity, and he had become determined to prove them wrong. If any extra winds could boost his efforts, he wanted to know more.

  As he floated above those clouds in Siberia, Post found what he was looking for. He felt that same sudden turbulence and then the unexpected boost from a roaring river of air, even though the sky around him was apparently serene. A few days later he felt the boost again as he crept to twenty thousand feet over Alaska. There really did seem to be something up there, something a pilot could use.

  When Post landed in New York, he had broken his previous record by more than twenty-one hours. The city gave him a ticker-tape parade. Everybody wanted to use his name for endorsements. Camel cigarettes enlisted him as a "famous smoker" even though he didn't actually smoke. Their ad contained a purported quote from Post: "It takes healthy nerves to fly around the world alone. Smoking Camels as I have for so long, I never worry about healthy nerves." Sometimes he'd even pretend to smoke a Camel, before stubbing it out after a couple of drags.

  But when he started babbling about how a sky that was obviously clear and empty was instead full of hurricane-force winds, there were plenty of people ready to laugh. They attributed his declaration variously to sitting too long in one position, lack of oxygen, or just plain flights of fancy as he sat there in his plane, on his own, with nobody to talk to, nothing else to do...

  Post couldn't bear to be doubted. He had come a long way for this, and he was determined to prove he was right.

  ***

  Like William Ferrel, Wiley Post began as a poor farm boy. But his was a very different character, born into a very different age. In Ferrel's time, America
was still a country of pioneers and struggle. But by the year of Wiley's birth, at the other end of the nineteenth century, the world was changing so quickly that news of it reached even the his rural community of Corinth, Texas. In 1898, cities had experienced such a spurt of growth that New York contained a staggering 3.5 million inhabitants. And near the cities, large industrial "manufactories" were springing up to make their centralized products and spread them throughout the country. For instance, a new breakfast cereal called "cornflakes" had started appearing in the shops. (It was an unhappy beginning since the formulation wasn't quite right, and the flakes turned rancid on the grocers' shelves.) In the same year, nearly one thousand of the new horseless automobiles rolled off American production lines. And five years later, at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, the Wright brothers would prove that men could fly.

  Wiley Post saw his first airplane at the age of fourteen. Unlike Ferrel, Post was no scholar. Sublimely uninterested in learning, he had quit school three years earlier and even now could barely spell his own name. But he'd always loved technology and he had an uncanny knack with machines. The young Post could fix just about anything from sewing machines to seeders, and had spent his time since leaving school going from farm to neighboring farm offering his services. The year before, he had earned enough money to buy one of America's first bicycles.

  But he forgot all about bicycles in fall 1913, when he went with his family to the county fair in Lawton, Oklahoma. Art Smith, one of America's first barnstormers, had brought along one of the first airplanes—a Curtis Pusher. Post ignored the amusement rides, the exhibitions, the displays of harvesters and planters. All that mattered was the plane. "I have never seen a bit of machinery for land, sea, or sky that has taken my breath away as did that old Pusher," Post later said. When the fair was over, and it was long past their prearranged meeting time, his brothers found him sitting in the Pusher's empty pilot seat, his head full of dreams.

  From that day onward, all Post wanted was to fly. But planes were new and exotic, and above all expensive. Nobody was going to hire an inexperienced farm boy to fly a plane, especially one who looked like Post. He was short, only five feet four inches tall, but he was also tough, with a belligerent temper that matched his flaming hair. What Post really needed was the money to buy his own plane. And if finding it involved a little risk-taking, so much the better.

  So Post became a highway robber. The scheme was ingenious, and much practiced in the later Depression: leave an apparently abandoned piece of machinery in the road to tempt passers-by to stop, and then leap out, brandish a gun, and demand their money. However, Post can't have been very good at it—he had apparently been terrorizing Grady County, Oklahoma, for some time when he was arrested in 1921, but he still had only twenty-seven cents in his pocket. Though he was sentenced to ten years in prison, he became so depressed and withdrawn that he was paroled after only a year. Post was always deeply ashamed of his criminal record and went to great lengths, when famous, to hide it from the world.

  The terms of Post's parole meant that he had to keep his record very clean. But that didn't mean he had to give up his dream of flying. He started working on the oil fields, but it wasn't long before he had found his way to Burrell Tibbs' Flying Circus and offered his services. He was lucky. As it happened, one of the circus's most important acts, the parachutist, had been injured the day before. The crowds loved watching a man leap to his possible death, and the circus urgently needed a replacement. Had Wiley ever jumped before? No? Well, not to worry; there's nothing to it. All you really have to do is strap on the chute and jump. There turned out to be rather more to it than that, but when Post finally remembered to pull the release cord, he floated down to Earth with a sensation that he called "one of the biggest thrills of my life."

  More jumps followed, along with some flying lessons and a little barnstorming. But even at fifty dollars a jump, Post couldn't earn the money he'd need to buy his own plane. Reluctantly, he headed back to the oil fields, to a drilling company named Droppleman & Cunliffe. His first day at work was October 1, 1926. It was also his last. The details of the day, like many of the stories surrounding Post, are slightly murky. A rotary chain had broken, and someone had taken up a hammer to knock a pin out of the chain. Post always claimed that someone else had struck the blow, but one of his coworkers later swore that it had been Post himself who inadvertently caused his own injury. In any case, what is certain is that a piece of steel broke off and flew into Post's left eyeball. Though a doctor tried to work the steel out with a needle, infection set in and a specialist was forced to remove Post's eye. Thirty days later, the State Industrial Commission of the State of Oklahoma ruled that Post was entitled to $1,698.25 compensation for his injury.

  Post may have lost an eye, but now he could have his plane.

  But first, Post had to learn to compensate for his injury. This was long before the days of reliable instruments to gauge a plane's height from the ground and distance from approaching obstacles, and with only one eye, he would struggle to judge such distances for himself. During his recuperation, Post spent several hours a day going for long walks. He would estimate the distance to that rock, or that cliff or mountain, and then pace it out to see if he was right, or the height of a tree and then climb it to check. His guesses became more and more accurate until, finally, Post decided that he was ready.

  Post's new plane, the Jenny, was a Canuck, built in Canada. She swallowed up most of his compensation money and he spent much of the rest on flying lessons. The plane turned out to be most convenient, and not only for business purposes. Post hired himself out as a pilot, but he also used the Jenny for his elopement. For Post had tumbled in love with his first cousin, Edna "Mae" Laine, and her parents were implacably opposed to the match. Their reluctance was fairly understandable. Mae was an innocent seventeen-year-old and Post a worldly man of twenty-eight. He had only one eye, he was irascible, and there was that regrettable history of highway robbery. And bouncing around America on newfangled airplanes wasn't exactly a steady job. Post realized he would have to take Mae in a way that her parents couldn't stop.

  On June 27, 1927, Mae and Wiley climbed into the Jenny. Mae had a small bag with a few possessions; Wiley had a marriage license in his pocket. Nobody has recorded what Mae's parents shouted when they heard the plane's engine fire up and realized she was inside. Perhaps the couple waved. But their escape was still not over. Only thirty miles south of Mae's parental home, the Canuck's engine stopped. Post looked around hastily and found a field that was fairly flat, and recently harvested, where he could land. But the couple was now in the middle of nowhere, and there was no way he could get the plane fixed that night. In the spirit of respectability, not to mention the worry that an irate father might arrive any minute and ruin the proceedings, Post took off in search of a preacher, who obligingly married the couple on the spot. They spent their wedding night in the open air on the wooden platform of an oil derrick.

  In the end, Mae's parents forgave Post. He certainly became more rich and famous than they had ever dreamed he would (though never quite as rich as he himself hoped). Working as the private pilot for a wealthy businessman, Post first won the National Air Race Derby from Los Angeles to Chicago. Then, in June 1931, came the first of his records, when he flew around the world with his navigator, Harold Gatty; the pair had traveled 15,474 miles in eight days, fifteen hours, and fifty-one minutes. During the entire trip, Post had slept less than fifteen hours.

  After that, and the solo record that followed, Post had all the fame that he could ever have wanted. But what he wanted even more now was to be believed. He had felt those high-altitude winds. He knew they were there. And he would prove it.

  To do this, he was going to have to go high and stay high, and for that he would need oxygen. The Winnie Mae was far too leaky to be pressurized, but perhaps he could have the oxygen piped into his own suit. Now there was a mechanical challenge fit for Wiley Post. He began furiously designing one suit after
another. The first was a two-piece, joined by an airtight belt, with pigskin gloves and rubber boots, and an aluminum helmet like a welder's with a trapdoor over the mouth so he could eat or drink. Sadly, as soon as he tried it on in a reduced-pressure chamber it unmistakably leaked. The second attempt was a little better, but although Post could get into it easily, he then found himself embarrassingly stuck. He had gained twenty pounds since his body measurements had been taken for manufacturing the suit and after several futile attempts at removal, it had to be cut off.

  The third time, though, was the charm. To guarantee the suit would fit, Post had an exact metal replica made of himself sitting comfortably in a chair, just as he would in the cockpit. This was then covered with latex to form the suit's inner shell. Oxygen came into the helmet from the left side, near his missing eye, so the flow of air wouldn't disturb his vision. The tests looked good. Post was ready to try what would prove to be the world's first spacesuit.

  First, Post simply wanted to fly as high as possible and make sure the suit held. On September 5, 1934, he reached an altitude of forty thousand feet and the suit worked well. On December 7 he took off again and made it to fifty thousand feet, a new record for powered flight (though the record remained unofficial, since one of Post's two barographs had frozen at 35,000 feet). Both times, Post felt the unmistakable shove from that high-altitude river of air. "As a result of this flight, I am convinced that airplanes can travel at terrific speeds above 30,000 feet, by getting into the prevailing wind channel," he reported.