An Ocean of Air (19 page)

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.

And now came the real test. Could he use the high winds to fly faster than the plane should conceivably be capable of flying, fast enough that his doubters would have to believe him? His first attempt came very close to disaster.

On February 22, 1935, Post took off from Burbank airport in California, bound for the East Coast. He climbed almost straight up, five miles high. But then, at 24,500 feet, he noticed a problem. The oil pressure suddenly dropped. If he didn't cut off the engine, every bearing in the plane would jam. Post began to drop in altitude, looking for somewhere to land the plane. He was only thirty-five minutes out of Burbank, but there was nothing like a runway in sight. Worse, he had jettisoned his landing gear to make the plane more streamlined. He would have to land on the plane's specially reinforced fuselage, and it was surely going to be rough. But then Post spotted a dry lake bed and, with true flying genius, managed to bring the plane down and to a safe halt.

He struggled his way out of the cockpit, but there was no way he could remove the pressure suit on his own. Hampered by the thick cloth, Post couldn't even reach around the back to unscrew his helmet. In the end he walked to a road, where a motorist was tinkering with his broken-down car. It must have been quite a sight. "The man's knees buckled and he almost fell over. He ran around to the back of his auto and peered at me. I had a time calming him down but I finally succeeded and he helped me out of my oxygen helmet. 'Gosh fellow,' he exclaimed when he found his voice, 'I was frightened stiff. I thought you had dropped out of the moon, or somewhere.'"

The two men walked together to get help. But it was only when the plane was brought back to Burbank for inspection that Post discovered what had gone wrong. Two pounds of metal filings and dust had deliberately been poured into the oil tank. Someone had tried to kill him.

Wiley Post, daredevil, ex-parachute jumper and highway robber, wasn't the sort to scare easily. On March 5, 1935, he climbed back into a plane that had been meticulously checked and set off again from Burbank. This time, all went well—at least at first. But when he reached Ohio, Post realized that he was almost out of oxygen. He had no choice but to drop back down to lower altitudes and land at Cleveland airport. Still, he had surely done enough. The
Winnie Mae
had flown two thousand miles in seven hours, nineteen minutes. That made her average speed nearly 280 miles an hour, which was at least one hundred miles an hour faster than she should be able to fly.

But somehow it still didn't convince people. Post was simply too unreliable a witness to overcome their prejudice against the idea of high winds in clear air. Perhaps if he could just get all the way to the East Coast ... But though he tried again, twice, mechanical failure kept bringing him down. According to one report, in the first of these attempts his helmet fogged up so much he had to clear it by scraping it with the tip of his nose. When his nose was so raw that it had smeared the glass with blood, he had to land.

It's a pity that nobody believed Wiley Post. He would die in a flying accident in Alaska (apparently an innocent one) years before the world realized he had been right. And in the meantime, human ignorance of his discovery would lead to more than one tragedy.

***

What Wiley Post had called "high winds" we now know as jet streams. These fast-flowing rivers of air circle the world in both hemispheres. They're not always invisible. Sometimes they drag white cirrus clouds along for the ride, and the long, thin trail they leave can be seen from space. Mount Everest pokes up into one stream that blows from west to east over Asia, which is why many portraits of the mountain show a trail of blowing snow over the eastern face. Jet streams are only a few hundred miles across and perhaps only a few miles deep, but they are fierce. Whipping along at speeds of more than one hundred and sometimes as much as
three hundred miles per hour, they are among the strongest winds in the world: faster than hurricanes, almost as fast as tornadoes, but with an influence that is much more far-reaching.

Post had caught his own glimpse of the jets over Siberia and Alaska, but the next time they showed up was above Japan, toward the end of the Second World War. American B-29 bombers had been specially designed to fly above thirty thousand feet, so they could evade enemy fighter planes while preserving their bombing accuracy. But, bizarrely, when they arrived over Japan their targeting went completely awry. The bombers should have been traveling at 340 miles per hour, but their instruments claimed they had a ground speed of 480. At that speed there was no way they could zero in on targets five miles below. The commanders were more inclined to blame the pilots for incompetence than to credit their tales of hurricane-strength winds above the clouds, but doubts were beginning to set in.

Still, nobody knew that these rivers of air could be anything more than a weird local effect until, on a hunch, the Japanese military released thousands of booby-trapped balloons in early 1945. The balloons were equipped with an ingenious device to keep them floating in the jet stream: If they dropped too low, a pressure sensor would detonate a charge and a small bag of ballast would be jettisoned into the Pacific. The military had no idea how far the balloons would get, but one thousand of them made it all the way to the west coast of America. By hitching a ride on their invisible river, they had traveled six thousand miles in only four days.

Many were shot down. Some were captured. "Japan attacks U.S. mainland with bomber balloons" was a headline guaranteed to cause panic, and the U.S. military was determined to keep the story out of the press. Then, on May 5, 1945, in Bligh, Oregon, a group of Sunday school children went out to the woods for a picnic. It was a beautiful summer day, and the kids suspected nothing as they raced over to the strange device that lay in a clearing. Nobody knows who touched it first, but their bones were embedded, along with shrapnel, into the surrounding trees. Five children and their teacher were killed. They were the only fatalities on mainland America during the entire war.

But while people in the northern hemisphere were discovering the power of the jet streams, nobody yet suspected that they might also occur in the south. Commercial flight was just beginning, and few planes could fly high enough to notice the change in wind. One of those few was a British Lancaster airliner called
Stardust,
which had been designed to fly high over the Andes in case it needed to avoid the storms and clouds that often hugged the mountain peaks. On August 2, 1947,
Stardust
took off on a straightforward flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina, bound for Santiago, Chile. This would involve a simple hop over Mount Tupangato, one of the highest peaks in the Andes. According to the weather reports, visibility would be poor, so as they approached the mountain the
Stardust
's pilot radioed his intention to climb up to 24,000 feet. Radio contact continued as normal; the pilot reported that he had crossed the mountain and was about to descend into Santiago airport. Then, without warning, the plane vanished.

After fifty baffling years, investigators have finally worked out what happened to the
Stardust.
It wasn't alien abduction, a South American "Bermuda Triangle," or any of the other bizarre theories that had been advanced in the intervening time. Instead, the unfortunate plane had encountered the southern jet stream. As
Stardust
rose to 24,000 feet, it suddenly encountered a fierce headwind blowing her backward at more than one hundred miles per hour. The problem was that the pilot didn't know this. He had no radar to tell him that his ground speed had just dropped by nearly half, nor were there any radio stations tracking his position from the cloud-covered, uninhabited ground below.

All he could do was calculate his position according to the speeds the instruments gave him. So when he thought he had arrived near Santiago, he had not yet cleared the mountain. When the plane crashed into the eastern face of Mount Tupangato, the three crew members and six passengers on board were killed instantly. Seconds later, an avalanche triggered by the impact covered the plane in a blanket of snow, from where it gradually sank into the heart of the glacier and made its frigid way down to the valley floor.

If the glacier hadn't spat out the remains of the plane some fifty years later, nobody would have known that the jet stream had claimed more vic
tims. And yet, the streams themselves are far from malevolent. Now that we understand them and can monitor where they form, they are even living up to Wiley Post's dream of using their power. A boost from the powerful jet stream that blows east from North America to Europe explains why transatlantic flights are nearly an hour faster going east than going west. And in 1999 a balloon, the
Brietling Orbiter,
used the jet streams to hitch a nonstop ride around the world.

But the jet streams are much more important than this—they are the final step in making our planet habitable. For they act as guides for the rolling ball bearings of Ferrel's circular storms.