Word: maccracken
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...model to estimate the effect of a worst- case scenario: simultaneous fires at all of Kuwait's rigs that would put as much as 50,000 tons of soot into the sky each day. "We see no way it's going to get to the upper atmosphere," says Michael MacCracken, who headed the project. "It will get rained out." A black, oily shower was descending upon Iran not long after last week's fires began...
Even so, climate modelers admit, building a completely realistic mock earth is an impossibly tall order. "You divide the world into a bunch of little boxes," explains Michael MacCracken, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The size of the geographic box -- the degree of detail called for -- limits the model. Smaller grids dramatically increase the number-crunching power required. "The state of the art would be to get down to small areas so we can say what's going to happen in Omaha," says Livermore's Stanley Grotch. "The models just aren't that good...
...have been grounded for his own good? Or was he a skilled pilot who prevailed, with a bit of his famed luck, over the hazards of poor aircraft and sloppy maintenance of the 1920s? These questions are raised in an intriguing exchange of letters between Lindy and William P. MacCracken Jr., the first head of the Commerce Department's former aeronautics branch. The letters, written in 1968, have only recently been disclosed by MacCracken's widow (he died in 1969 and Lindbergh...
Lindbergh readily agreed with MacCracken that he had to parachute from planes no fewer than four times in his barnstorming and mail-piloting days before his solo flight to Paris in 1927. But he explained to MacCracken that he had been flying Army salvage aircraft with "rotting longerons, rusting wires and fittings, badly torn fabric, etc." Once, he wrote, "my rusted rudderbar post broke while I was instructing a student during a low-altitude turn in an OX5 Standard." Another time, "my wooden propeller threw its sheet-metal tipping on a southbound mail flight from Chicago." Again, "my DH throttle...
...letters, MacCracken revealed to Lindy that after his fourth jump in 1927, "I was thinking of grounding you so you wouldn't be taking so many chances." He did not do so only because Bill Robertson, one of the owners of the mail service for which Lindbergh was flying, "came into my office in the Department of Commerce while I had on my desk the report [on that last bailout]. Bill persuaded me not to do it because he said they were still trying to get the last $2,000 or $3,000 to build the plane...