Page 149 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

the aftermath of fido

FIDo proved to be one of the innovation success stories of World War II.
It was a crash research program that became operational; it saved lives and
equipment; and it definitely gave the edge to Allied aviation during the last two
years of the war. But FIDo was feasible only under the desperate conditions of
wartime. Bomber Command, its chief beneficiary, credited it with introducing a
“revolutionary change in the air war,” but its success was never replicated. When
the FIDo system was ignited at an airfield, up to 6,000 gallons of gasoline were
burned during the time required to land one aircraft. By comparison, a Mos-
quito bomber might burn between 10 and 20 gallons of fuel during its landing
approach. It is estimated that during the two and a half years that FIDo was in
operation, airfields that used it consumed a total of 30 million gallons of gasoline.
Such expenditures were justifiable only when national survival was at stake. Iron-
ically, FIDo’s success was due in large part to the brilliant but modest British
defense engineer Guy Stewart Callendar, who was the first scientist to attribute
the enhanced greenhouse effect to the burning of fossil fuels, who designed key
components of the system (including the trench burners), and who was one of
the patent holders on the massive FIDo fuel burner. 49
After the war, a FIDo system was planned for London’s Heathrow Airport,
but it was never installed. For a time, FIDo systems were maintained at the
Blackbushe and Manston RAF bases, but according to one 1957 estimate, the cost
of running a FIDo installation was prohibitively expensive—₤44,500 an hour.
Experiments using jet engines installed along runways to heat and disperse fog
at orly Airport near Paris and in Nanyuan, China, met with mixed results. The
main technique for dealing with fog, developed after the war, was not weather or
cloud modification but the widespread use of instrumented landing techniques. 50

the airs of the future

on July 11, 1934, Willis R. Gregg, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, presided over
the dedication ceremony at the air-conditioned house at the Century of Progress
World’s Fair in Chicago. It was the Midwest’s hottest summer to date, with tem-
o
o
peratures that day in St. Louis reaching 100 F (38 C), but Chicago, cooled by a
o
o
breeze from Lake Michigan, reached only a moderate 82 F (28 C). It was a dust
bowl year, with little rain and the average regional temperatures soaring 5 to 10
degrees above normal. Gregg’s theme, broadcast over NBC Radio, was weather
control, and he began by discounting the “fantastic methods” of the professional

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