Weatherman

While Chicagoans droned in bed before dawn one morning last week, it was morning 18,000 ft. up in the cold, paling sky where Pilot Roy Colton, 27, circled in an open cockpit biplane. In line of duty he was taking notes on the height and thickness of cloud layers, ice forming conditions, the direction and violence of the wind (80 m.p.h. that morning). His chief work was being done inside a little streamlined box strung on rubber cords between the outer struts of his right wing. In it, human hairs squeezed of oil and moisture were taking in the atmosphere's moisture; a vacuum box was taking its pressure; a bimetallic strip contracting at two different rates in the 4DEG-below-zero cold was taking its temperature. The three operations were being recorded by three minutely moving pencil arms on a cylinder revolving once every four hours. As he had done nearly every morning for more than six months, Pilot Colton would give his notes and the box (an aerometeorograph) to the Weather Bureau representative on the ground, collect his fee which depended on the height his instruments showed (nothing below 3,000 ft., $3 at 3,000 and up to $30 at 16,500) and go to bed.

Unscheduled was the sudden sputter and stopping of his engine. He slanted his biplane toward the ground looking for an open space, saw only the regimented houses of Chicago suburbs. With his hand frozen to the stick, he rode the wind into a suburban street, ripped into telephone wires, stripping the plane's wings. The fuselage dropped lightly to the ground. Pilot, notes and aerometeorograph were undamaged. Next dawn he was at work again above Chicago, since the Weather Bureau lets its airplane observation contracts on condition that pilots have two planes with instruments always ready.

Weatherman Colton's crash made citizens conscious of a new profession. Before airplanes, kites and balloons took weather recording instruments aloft in out-of-the-way places. But kites require wind, balloons not too much wind; both are unusable in bad weather; both have been scrapped except for one kite-station in Ellendale, N. Dak. In July 1931, Weather Bureau stations in Chicago, Cleveland and Dallas let the first U. S. contracts to aviators for weather observation. Omaha and Atlanta have been added to the list. A weather plane goes up once a week in Fairbanks, Alaska.

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