Tornado Pilot

Pilots of sound mind normally give tornadoes plenty of airspace. The tall clouds that spawn twisters are boiling with turbulence, and the black funnels themselves can tear an airplane to shreds. Pilot James M. Cook, 6 ft. 3 in. and slow-spoken, is thoroughly sane, but whenever a threatening cloud shows its face in the Middle West, he hops into his war-surplus Mustang at Kansas City and takes the cloud's pulse and temperature, even if it is crawling with vicious twisters.

Storm Buster. Cook, 34, learned to fly at 14 and soloed at 15. Last year, while dusting crops in the Nebraska panhandle, he made a sideline of busting hailstorms. Whenever an unusually black and mean-looking thunderhead drifted toward the sugar-beet fields of the North Platte Valley, Cook would fly into it, seeding its turbulent heart with silver-iodide particles. This maneuver provided the cloud with plenty of nuclei for ice to form on, so the hailstones did not grow big enough to fall and cut up the tender beet leaves.

While spiking hailstorms, Cook studied them in an amateur way. "Some of those storms," he says, "had a heck of a lot more muscle than others. I couldn't figure out why." To find out more about clouds, he went to a meteorological meeting at Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College and had a long talk with three men from the Kansas City weather bureau. One of these was Donald C. House, supervising forecaster of SELS (Severe Local Storm Warning Center), which tries to decide what clouds are likely to lash the ground with destructive twisters. After the talk, the meteorologists agreed that what tornado forecasting needed most was a man to investigate the clouds' innards and that Pilot Cook was the man.

Cook's specially equipped Mustang was ready for this year's tornado season, and he began his hunting on April 15. He carries 500 lbs. of weather instruments and a radio altimeter. A movie camera takes continuous pictures of the airplane's flying instruments. Whenever he thinks it worthwhile, Cook talks, in his calm drawl, to a tape recorder.

When he sees a likely cloud, he dodges in and out of it. He tries to avoid the seething cores, and when things get tough he ducks toward the ground, always keeping watch for the deadly funnel of a tornado.

A Bit Choppy. Cook's tape recordings do not sound like a man who is flying close to the most violent weather that nature can serve up. "It's getting awfully hard to see out here," he remarks calmly. "Can't see very much ahead. It's getting a little bit choppy. Beginning to look pretty green.'' Cook explains that "looking green" means seeing hail in the heart of the cloud.

Hail always looks that way. He does not like hail, and he tries to keep at least five miles away from tornadoes. "If you play too close," he says, "sooner or later you'll plow up a snake. That's not for me."

When Cook comes back from the storm clouds, he has a talk with the weathermen at Kansas City, and the records of his instruments are analyzed. The purpose of all this, explains Forecaster House, is to learn more about the structure of clouds that generate tornadoes.

Last year SELS correctly anticipated 32% of the tornadoes and scored near misses on another 30%. This season its tornado forecasts are right about half the time, and the information brought to earth by Cook (which will not be used in predictions until next year) should help to raise the score toward the Weather Bureau's goal of eight out of ten.

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