The Wild Winds

The Wild Winds Why do so many planes crash into mountains--when mountain peaks are so well charted? The Air Force Cambridge Research Center suspects that some of these crashes are caused by the wild behavior of the mountain winds. Last week the Air Force sent Professor Paul Queney to the West Coast to team up with Professor J. Holmboe of U.C.L.A. in a study of mountain winds.

When the wind blows across a steep, high range, it does not merely veer up and then down. As it descends the leeward slope, the wind often breaks into thick, white, turbulent clouds called "rotors" that look rather like surf foaming up on a beach. Above the rotors are high oscillations in the air, which sometimes reach up to 100,000 ft.

It is these high "standing waves" that are under suspicion. They often contain winds that blow either up or down at 4,000 ft. per min. A down-draught of such violence can smack down a high-flying airplane against a chunk of rock before the pilot realizes he is anywhere near a mountain. Sometimes his altimeter (which measures air pressure, not actual height) gives him no warning; the turbulent waves in the lee of high mountains often have spots of rarefied air that make the instrument read much higher than it should.

Drs. Queney and Holmboe will do most of their work on the ground with pencils and scratch pad. The chief practical scientist of the airwave project is German-born Dr. Joachim Kuettner, former world record glider pilot, who will fly and watch others fly into the waves themselves.

The work will center at Bishop, Calif., where the wind from the Pacific, hitting the high Sierras, sets up waves that can lift an insulated, pressurized glider up to 42,000 ft. Flying gliders into these windy elevators has become a popular hair-raising sport, and the flights of the Southern California Soaring Association are an ideal means of investigating the waves. Working with the glider pilots, Dr. Kuettner will bring back information from which Drs. Queney and Holmboe hope to work out a way of predicting the wind's behavior.

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