The first aviation weather forecast

It has been over 113 years since the Wright Brothers' first flight. Like most big events, we see the flashy accomplishment but don't see or appreciate all of the small steps and important details involved in getting there. In fact, celebrities, businesspeople, Nobel Prize winners, and other well-known people often say something like, "It took 20 years to become an overnight success."

The Wright Brothers went to Kitty Hawk several times before 1903's first flight, and the plans and work that went into pulling that off started even before they first left Dayton. In the years before December 17, 1903, they spent hours that led to years of their time laying the groundwork. After all, if you're planning to do the impossible, it pays to do your homework.

One of the elements of their preparation was finding a place that had the sort of weather that would allow for testing the model and the final aircraft. While today we have hi-definition radar maps on our smartphones, reasonably accurate forecasts a week from this afternoon, and Jim Cantore getting blown off of beaches all around the country on the Weather Channel, weather forecasting was still in its infancy back then.

Even what data and forecasts we did have at the dawn of the 20th Century tended to be in generalities over time spans of months and seasons, not the hour-by-hour "It will be 74° with a 17% chance of rain at 11 a.m. on Thursday" forecasts we take for granted. But that was just fine for the Bishop's Boys who just wanted a place that was windier than Ohio during the late fall/early winter, when their bicycle shop tasks wound down for the season.

To this end, Wilbur casually tossed off "one of the most remarkable letters in the history of science" to Octave Chanute on May 13, 1900—three and a half years before the first flight. The penultimate paragraph notes

My business requires that my experimental work be confined to the months between September and January and I would be particularly thankful for advice as to a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about fifteen miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather. I am certain that such localities are rare. 

Chanute's answer to the weather question:

The two most suitable locations for winter experiments which I know of are near San Diego, California, and St. James City (Pine Island), Florida, on account of the steady sea breezes which I have found to blow there. These, however, are deficient in sand hills, and perhaps even better locations can be found on the Atlantic coasts of South Carolina or Georgia.

Wilbur also pored over tables of data from the Weather Bureau (the predecessor to what we know today as the National Weather Service) and, based on the wind speeds and weather they contained combined with the presence of the sand hills that Chanute suggested, narrowed down his search to what would eventually be the final decision of Kitty Hawk.

Once that good candidate was found, he then wrote a letter to Joseph Dosher, who worked the Weather Bureau station at Kitty Hawk. His reply came 117 years ago today, August 16, 1900, and is the first "aviation weather" forecast:

[T]he beach here is about one mile wide clear of trees or high hills, and islands for nearly sixty miles south. Conditions: the wind blows mostly from the North and Northeast September and October which is nearly down this piece of land. Giving you many miles of a steady wind with a free sweep.

They took his word for it and were not disappointed. They spent several seasons testing their aeronautical ideas on gliders at Kitty Hawk during the winter months, then would return to Dayton for the rest of the year to tend to the bicycle shop and to take what they had learned in North Carolina, refine and improve it, and bring their newest ideas back to the beach during the winter. The amount of work they did in Dayton is why Ohio deserves to be called the "Birthplace of Aviation" even if North Carolina did get the first flight.

Calling this the "first aviation weather forecast" is a bit in jest. The first "real" one wouldn't be until almost 15 years later, as the National Weather service notes:

On Dec. 1, 1918, the U.S. Weather Bureau issued its first aviation weather forecast. It was for the Aerial Mail Service route from New York to Chicago. On May 20, 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act, which included legislation directing the Weather Bureau to "furnish weather reports, forecasts, warnings, to promote the safety and efficiency of air navigation in the United States."

See you next Wednesday!


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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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