Weather is one of those absolutely,
utterly vital components for the military.
It doesn't matter whether it's
And we,
back the boundaries
And there was a time,
there was a belief the next world war
of stuff would be flown below 250 feet,
250 feet, they can see you.
Which no one else in the Air Force flew
to discover for the meteorologists
boundary layer, so they could forecast it.
And that's the only way
The Canberra was very good for
if you fly an aeroplane across the sky and
everybody knows where it is
So we have to find out where in the sky
the condensation trails.
And you can only do that by going up there
and with their research equipment.
To find that information out.
And we're continually—
Fundamentally, what we were doing,
was dealing with climate change.
How is the climate changing?
You know, how can we help farmers,
you know, politicians, airlines?
You name it.
So the Met Office can't do it because
They don't have
very high, very fast jets at very high
or long distances.
We can go anywhere, almost anywhere
So that's why all of the— the only people
who are military there were the aircrew.
The engineers, the scientists,
with at Farnborough were civilians.
And there's no way they
We were experts at doing what we do, at
People were worried about the ozone layer,
used to spray ourselves
At the time— we're talking about the '70s—
senior scientists in the Met Office
getting thicker and not thinner.
So with the Hercules,
spent a week or 2 weeks in Gibraltar.
The theory that this guy had was
there because it had an affinity
and silicon is basically dust,
to silicon dust and be burnt off
So they would never reach there.
So the idea is that we would fly down
into the Atlantic where at a certain time
there would be a westerly wind off
and you could see it right out
And we would push canisters
particles and fly them back to be checked.
While we were there, we also calibrated
weather satellite.
So we got right underneath it,
temperatures and pressures and all
so they could calibrate the satellite.
People started to worry about
falling on cars and leaving cars pitted.
So we were asked to
mount an exercise where we would fly
from Birmingham across country
and to the middle of the sea because
acid rain, it was the Dutch acid rain or
So I did this flight.
It's a 10-hour flight,
dust particles, flying up and down.
