Godspeed, Goddard

Words have lost much of their impact these days. The word "extreme" was one of the first to go. At one time, it meant something serious or overpowering. Then it got taken over by marketers, truncated to "Xtreme" and applied to a flavor of Mountain Dew that absolutely nobody asked for.

"Epic" came in to fill the void left with the watering-down of "extreme", but it sadly fell to the hyperbolist hordes as well. It used to mean something like Beowulf and slaying dragons, then it went on to describing something very impressive like pulling off a 1200 on the drop from the helicopter on the drop to snowboard down the Matterhorn, but then in the span of about a week it went from that to celebrating the "epic achievement" of eating an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting. Dude, that's sooo epic!

"Passion" used to mean an intense, almost overwhelming desire. Now every unoriginal job seeker has "I'm passionate about synergistic cross-contextual gerbil herding" or some other such nonsense on their résumé. Let's be clear: I'm passionate about my wife; that means I love her intensely and I couldn't live without her. I'm passionate about flying: I love it intensely and I couldn't live without it (mainly because I'd starve, although at this point it might take a year or two). No one is "passionate" about gerbil herding; at best they might be vaguely interested in it and frankly not all that good at it.

The word "legend" gets thrown around in the same way, but in this case, Dick Goddard was an actual legend of the old school meaning. He passed away yesterday at the age of 89. Unless you're from the Cleveland, Ohio area, that probably doesn't mean a lot to you. Around Cleveland, though, he's a legend for many reasons.

First, he was a TV meteorologist in Cleveland for over 51 years, making his career longer than anyone—including the Weather Channel. His career was so long that when he was in college, weather satellites didn't even exist! The first successful weather satellite would launch a month before he graduated from Kent State in 1960. By the time he retired in late 2016, he had seen forecasting go from static, laboriously-crafted, hand-drawn paper maps to real-time interactive Ultra-HD animations.

Although he and I never met, he was a small ripple in the cosmic current that led to me becoming a pilot. When I was a child, there was no cable TV yet. Cities generally had their own NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliate stations plus a few truly local stations. The network affiliate stations played content provided by their affiliates most of the day, but there were several hours that the local station provided their own programming.

This included the local news. The news hour was much less bland, sterilized, and standardized than it is today. Every city had its own specific flavor to its journalism, and the nightly news teams themselves had different characters. TV personalities back then who delivered the news, sports, and weather weren't interchangeable, generic talking heads whose names you don't bother to remember because they'll only be around until someone cheaper graduates from broadcasting school, they were interesting individuals.

If you want to see a young George Carlin in a suit and tie give three examples of what I'm talking about (plus several mock commercials), watch this video. You can even see an early Al Sleet, before Carlin added one of his funniest lines ever ("Tonight's forecast: dark. Continued mostly dark tonight, turning to widely scattered light in the morning."):

Dick Goddard, even by those standards, had a clear personality. He was a sincere, direct, intelligent soul. Long before animal activism was a thing, at the end of his segment he would sometimes feature dogs, cats, or other animals that were in the local shelter looking for a forever home. (When Ohio recently implemented stronger anti-animal abuse laws, it named the bill "Goddard's Law".)

Other times, he would give mini-classes on air during his weather report. Sometimes it would be something as simple as explaining what an Alberta Clipper is while blaming it for the frigid cold to come. Or it could be simply explaining the difference between "partly cloudy" and "partly sunny". (Partly cloudy means more sun than clouds, and vice-versa. Pretty basic stuff, but I thought it was cool technical weather arcana back when I was 10 or so.) He not only loved the weather, he loved making you love it too. (A few years ago, I found a copy of his book Six Inches of Partly Cloudy: Cleveland's Legendary TV Meteorologist Takes on Everything--and More and devoured it in one day because his enthusiasm is still there.)

He helped kindle my life-long interest in the weather and a connection with what was going on up in the sky. Observing the atmosphere for so long made me want to swim in it, so it was inevitable that I would become a pilot someday. I didn't know when, and I didn't know how, but I knew that I would.

Even though we never met, he was a part of that. I'm sad that we never met because there was a yearly opportunity to do so. He created the Woollybear Festival, a one-day town fair in Vermilion, a pretty little place only about 15 minutes away from me. Each fall, I said I wanted to go, yet each year, when the day came, I said I'd do it next year instead. Now he won't be there next year except in our hearts and the chance to meet him is gone forever.

So do the thing you want to do while you can; see the people you want to spend time with now because there will inevitably come a day when you can't.

I'll close with this video that sums up the man and why he is such a legend in only two minutes:

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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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Weather pictures speak a thousand words, Part 2: Weather hazards

Part 1 had lots of pictures of air masses demonstrating how much the atmosphere flows like water. This time, let's see what happens when the weather misbehaves.

Icing

The problem with ice isn't, as many pilots think, that it adds a lot of weight. In reality, it doesn't weigh all that much compared to the enormous performance penalty it creates by changing the shape and/or smoothness of the wing surface. After all, how efficient would your wing be if it were made from rock candy?

That nub on the windshield wiper is put there specifically to ice up. That way you can easily see if you're picking up ice, since it's right in your field of view--unlike the wings.

Thunderstorms

Some days, you have no choice but to dodge towering cumulus clouds:

At least there was a gap between those. Here's something you don't want to see sitting right over your initial approach fix:

Sure, thunderstorms are pretty when you're sitting on the ground:

They're not so pretty when you're trying to get from one airport to another, however. This is a classic frontal line, where a cold front plows through, lifting the air ahead of it and creating a long line of thunderbumpers:

And this (like the first thunderstorm picture above) one is a classic air mass or "pop-up" thunderstorm. It's easy to identify because it's all by itself:

In What do beer and thunderstorms have in common? I wrote about what helps a pocket of convection build into a monster like this. If there isn't enough energy to create something like the big guy above, you might end up with a failed thunderstorm that never happened, like this:

You can tell from the wispiness of the cloud that it tried to get going but fizzled out. (Not surprisingly, as I took that picture at 7:12 a.m. before the heat of the day added enough fuel to the atmospheric fire. There were thunderstorms there later that afternoon.) However, if there is enough energy to get the convection ball rolling, you end up with something like the next four pictures, each taken two minutes apart:

See how fast that grew? In less than eight minutes, it went from a little puff to a decently-growing towering cumulus. If I'd have had a chance to take more, you probably would have seen it keep growing even more. It's almost like a bomb going off, which is what this pocket of convection looked like:

That's why in the post Why there is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime I compared the average thunderstorm's power and an atomic bomb's power.

Ever wonder what rain would look like if you could see it from the side instead of having it fall directly on your head? On the ground, you can't do that, but from the air you see it all the time. It's the misty stuff in these pictures:

And here you can see some virga, which is rain that evaporates before making it to the ground:

Here I am getting rained on while above the clouds! Why? Because there's another layer above me:

But as the day goes on and the sun begins to set, the ground begins to cool and more energy isn't being fed into the convection system anymore. Things begin to calm down and die out:

Even when it's cruddy on the ground, it can be beautiful above. Check out next week's post for how pretty it can be once you blast through the gray on the ground.


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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 a DHC-8 type rating, 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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Weather pictures speak a thousand words, Part 1: The air flowing like water

During the private pilot ground school I teach at the local college, we spend two full weeks on weather. Some people's eyes glaze over at the technical discussion of things like heat exchange processes, fronts, air masses, standard pseudoadiabatic lapse rates, and the other things that go into the atmospheric dynamo that creates the weather.

Personally, I love weather, which will probably come as no surprise to those of you who have seen all of the posts I've written on it throughout the last several years. One of the things that I enjoy most about flying is that you're not just talking about some abstract concept: you're actually up in the atmosphere dealing with weather on every single flight. That, after all, is why we spend so much time on it in class!

This time, instead of the typical post analyzing a certain weather phenomenon, I'm just going to show pictures of the processes in action. Lots and lots of pretty pictures. In fact, so many pictures I need to split this one into more than one post!

Air Masses

Weather comes from air moving. It's that simple. Everything else is details. The air starts moving because the equator heats up more than the poles because the sun hits the equator more directly. After that, the warm air tries to flow toward the colder poles. It doesn't make it there due to things like the coriolis effect, but its attempt it what sets the weather process in motion.

I said the air tries to flow from the equator to the poles. That's because one of the other important things to keep in mind is that air behaves like a liquid.

Yes, this is a picture of actual water. However, you'll notice that you'll see the same sort of behavior in many of the pictures to come.

Imagine dropping a pebble into a very gently flowing stream. It's easy to visualize what would happen: you would get ripples that would follow the current.

Now imagine that instead of dropping a pebble downward, you threw it up into the sky. That wouldn't do much, but if you heat a parcel of air (like, for example, by having a big smokestack with a lot of hot air rising out of it), you can do almost the same thing, as you can see in the next two pictures.

Now imagine if you had the same stream, but on the stream bed were some ridges. As the stream flows along, the water at the bottom gets pushed upward when it hits the ridges. This would cause some small waves or bulges on the surface. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain recounts how he learned the art of reading the Mississippi River. One of the things an experienced riverboat pilot could do was to be able to read what's under the surface just by seeing what the surface looked like.

Air does the same thing and has the same telltale signs. I spend much of my flying time going across and along the Blue Ridge Mountains. I have numerous pictures of "gravity waves", which is the technical term for ripples in the air that happen when air hits something like the ridges of the Blue Ridge.

First, here's what the mountains themselves look like:

Now here's what happens when air flows across those ridges:

If the cloud remains connected between waves, the gravity wave "humps" are still there on top:

 

 

Here's an excellent cap cloud:

If the conditions are just right, the waves can actually crest! These are Kelvin-Helmholz waves, and can be seen where two fluids meet at different velocities. They can even be seen clearly and beautifully in the atmospheric bands of Jupiter, but on Earth they're easy to spot along muddy riverbanks where the slower water near the bank encounters the faster current in mid-river, or when a breeze blows over the ocean, or (like what's happening in this picture) a faster layer of air rides over a slower one:

Continuing with the stream metaphor: what would happen if the stream hit an obstacle that it was too shallow to go over? It would back up and be dammed, right? Or if you live near water, you've probably seen a breakwall, which is a man-made obstacle placed in front of waves to cut down on erosion.

If the conditions are right (meaning stable air and lots of moisture in that air), the air will do the same thing water would do: it will hit the obstacle and either try to crash over it or get backed up behind it. The next picture is what happens when it flows over it. Recall that as the air rises, it cools. Once it cools to its dewpoint, it dumps its moisture and creates a nice cloud that traces the ridgeline almost perfectly:

The next picture was taken outside the airport entrance at State College, PA, early in the morning. I was standing there for about 20 minutes watching the veeeeerrrrrryyyy slooooowww process of the air hitting the mountain like water hitting a breakwall and slowly splashing up and over it. And by "slowly" I mean about half an hour for one "wave"!

The next two pictures show the same thing happening a couple of months later:

Here is the air getting dammed when it hits the ridge. The sharply defined line is it stopping when it hits the ridge and getting backed up like water in a reservoir. If you look closely you can see the mountains it is hitting:

To cap off part 1, here's some very stable air trapping a cloud in between two ridges, with the skyline of New York City in the distance:

In part 2, there are more pretty pictures. This time, it's about weather hazards: icing and thunderstorms. If you've ever wondered what rain looks like from above, head over there now!


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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 a DHC-8 type rating, 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.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.