FLYING IN STORM

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 72, 13 January 1947, Page 7

FLYING IN STORM

EFFECT ON COMMUNICATIONS EXPERIMENTS CARRIED OUT Experiments indicate that snowflakes do not follow the airflow pattern. of a plane in flight but rather tend to strike the leading edge of the wings and at high speed break up into from 30 to 500 fragments. This breaking up of snowflakes into tiny particles creates sufficient static electricity to account for the blackout of voice communications between a plane and the ground, one of the hazards connected with flying in a snow storm, according to Vincent J. Schaefer of the General Electric’s Research Laboratory. A comparison has been made of the amount, of electricity carried by the snow from the sky and the amount created by friction when the snow particles are broken up. In an experiment a falling snowflake was accelerated to a speed of 65 miles an hour and caused to hit a metal surface at an angle of 45 degrees. This showed, according to Mr Schaefer, that on an average a snow crystal carries a charge equivalent to 17,500 electrons. Going at 65 miles an hour and striking a metal plate, the fracture of the crystal “raises this average charge by a factor of more than a hundred times in some instances,” the researcher reports.

Plastic replicas of the snowflake crystals and their fragments were made by a process perfected by Mr Schaefer in 1941. It was shown that each of the more fragile forms of snow crystals breaks into about 500 fragments. “The results indicate what happens when a plane flies into a snowstorm,” Mr Schaefer states. “The snow hitting the leading edge of the wings or passing through the propeller at speeds of 200-500 miles an hour are broken into fine ice dust with the attendant development of large amount of frictional electricity,” and it is this static electricity which blacks out radio in an aeroplane in flight in a snow storm.