Wings of Blue

Weather

Horoscopes with numbers. That's what Walt called weather forecasts.

Walt wasn't with us, unfortunately. He was asleep in his bed back in Panama City while Evan and I droned through the night off the coast of Costa Rica in a twin-engine cargo plane, dodging some of the most fearsome thunderstorms this side of Valhalla. Our weather flimsy promised us fair skies and stars overhead but one look at the lightning outside proved that a lie. The weatherman who had given us the report earlier in the day was a cheerful airman who had probably never seen lightning in his life except from the comfort of his bedroom window. Maybe at the ripe age of nineteen he thought the occasional storm still qualified as "fair." It didn't. If Walt had been with us, he would have taken one look out the cockpit window and pronounced his verdict. Horoscopes with numbers.

"You want to turn?" Evan asked.

It was so dark that we couldn't see outside unless lightning lit up the sky, so Evan was staring at the radar. Its screen was black, too, except for a green blip that marched down its center toward us.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Is it rain?"

"I don't know."

I looked outside again. The storm was off to our left. The ocean was below and to our right. We were fifty miles off the coast already and I didn't want to fly any further over the water if I could help it. I didn't like flying over the water, especially at night.

"Maybe it's nothing," Evan suggested. He was even newer than me and he had narcolepsy to boot. Since he slept through most of his flights, the fact that he was even looking at the radar tonight was a novel experience.

"Yeah, maybe."

The weather is a beautiful irony in the tropics. The same environmental factors that produce dazzling sunny days also create storms of volcanic fury. Solar heating, the earth's rotation, upper-level winds, mountains, oceans, and the occasional El Niño work the latitudes from Ecuador to Guatemala the way Mongol hordes used to work rural villages.

The storms they create are different from those in the States. In northern climes thunderstorms usually appear as part of a front, a line of unstable air that sucks in moisture to rise with its heat, creating bumpy cauliflower shapes that grow dark with rain and rumble echoes of thunder from Ohio to Missouri. Sometimes that happened in Central America but more often the hazard was a single cumulus buildup, the 'white puffie' that got carried away and swelled to twice the size of Everest. These floated ominously around the sky hiding the violence within their mass, looking for a pressure system or a mountain to smack into so they could dump their rain and give vent to the thunder and lightning and rushing winds inside.

During the day we learned to watch for clues that there might be storms inside a random cloud. Gray was the warning that rain -- and therefore powerful downdrafts -- was inside. Updrafts went with any cumulus cloud. They were what made the cloud and gave it its haphazard, blooming shape. But when the updrafts met the downdrafts, that's when things got ugly. Together these roaring columns of air could rip an aircraft apart. It was like being hit by elevators going in opposite directions.

During the day that gray color was often the only sign that one cloud was not like the others, that somewhere along the line it had fallen into evil ways and now was beckoning with one hand while hiding a knife in the other. That recognition was important because we flew in the middle altitudes of 10,000 to 25,000 feet where thunderstorm activity is common and lightning even more so. Instead of flying over storms we usually had to dodge between them like a pedestrian sidestepping a fight.