A Few Additional Tales of the South Pacific—Part 2
The Pan Am 747 touched down in American Samoa on June 20, 1975, at 4 am—a disorienting time to arrive anywhere, but especially in this instance because I hadn’t yet recovered my composure from the events the previous evening (Part 1 of this series).
I’d used up a week’s supply of adrenaline and now had skipped a night’s sleep. On approach to Pago Pago (rhymes with bongo bongo—the letter g is always pronounced ‘ng’) the flight attendants handed out Customs forms, and I realized I had a new little problem: one of the so-called Class 1 drugs listed on the Customs form was in my luggage.
The plane taxied to within a hundred yards of the terminal and shut down. The door opened and we descended to the tarmac.
One of the other NCAR team members, Jim, happened to be on the Pan Am 747 as well. While we passengers stood on the tarmac our luggage was being unloaded next to the plane. Jim and I found ours and joined the mass of passengers oozing toward the open-walled terminal and Customs. I couldn’t exactly open my suitcase to fish out and somehow toss the offending item (a bag of pills given to me by a fellow student the previous year to use as a study aid, which was a total disaster; yet I hadn’t thrown them away, and at the last minute I tossed them in my suitcase ‘just in case’).
We were getting close enough to see what American Samoan Customs looked like—every article was being examined, down to ladies’ compacts being opened and carefully examined, including lifting off the little pad inside the compact to see what lay underneath; cigarette lighters were being tested, and open packs of cigarettes being peered into. My little problem was about to become a bigger problem.
I noticed a heavy, wide-faced Samoan man who looked like an airport official or policeman, working his way slowly along the Customs line in our direction; he was stopping at each male passenger, saying something and holding up a small piece of paper. One person after another was shaking their head “no.”
But I’m focused on the table beyond him, where every article of clothing is being removed from someone’s suitcase. I’m doomed.
Finally the man reaches me.
“Mr. Grantham?” He holds up the piece of paper—it has my name on it. I immediately assume that—somehow—they already know about what’s in my suitcase—I try to think of some another name—but it’s no use. “It’s me,” I admit.
“Marcel—you know Marcel? He couldn’t make it to the airport. He asked me to meet you here.” (Marcel was an NCAR senior scientist, and for this project, he was the station manager in American Samoa.)
We shook hands. I introduced Jim; the man seemed surprised that there were two of us.
He excused himself and returned with a pad, and asked Jim to write down his name, and then looked at it dubiously.
He turned to me: “You too, please?”
Tired and stressed as I was, I was still partially locked into watching the Customs tables and thinking about Samoan jails—it didn’t really change anything that he’d said Marcel had asked him to meet me—I was still headed into the buzz-saw of Customs. I had the wild thought to make up a name, put down anything, but when I started writing all that came were the familiar letters.
The official took the pad from me and peered at it, then said, “Ah, come with me please.”
Jim and I picked up our bags and hurried—unchecked—through Customs and out to a waiting limousine.
The official smiled and said, “Welcome to American Samoa!” He then told me I had a room at the Pago Pago Americana, as our quarters at the airport were not yet ready.
We shook hands again as I thanked him more sincerely than he could ever imagine.
We got in the limousine and were soon on the coastal road to Pago (locals say it just once). In the gray pre-dawn light I could see jungle-covered slopes tumbling down the mountainside to our left, barely tucked under the narrow winding road. To our right, heavy gray waves pushed onshore, often sharply peaking as they passed over hidden masses of rock or reef. Jagged silhouetted stone shapes pierced the water, tearing at the waves. Water-infused air poured through the open window. My head was spinning.
We passed through tiny coastal villages: Faganeanea, Matu’u, Tagapofu and others, finally skirting into the steep valley holding American Samoa’s deep-water harbor, a collapsed volcanic cone. The black shoulders of Mts. Alava and Pioa (the latter known as ‘The Rainmaker’) stood across the narrow bay from us.
When I got to my hotel room, I immediately flushed the pills down the toilet—lesson learned, I thought. Little did I know there would be more to learn—much more.
After a couple hours of sleep Jim and I met with those team members who’d arrived before us: Marcel, Gene (an NCAR electrician), and Mark (another project employee). We found out then that our project was a very big deal on the island. One more team member, Jerry (the fourth project employee), arrived later that day.
We stayed at the Americana a few days until our quarters at the airport were fixed up (Marcel called them “posis,” (POZ-eez)—I think a New Zealand term derived from the word ‘position.’)
We soon saw that our posis were situated about 300 yards from the 9000-foot-long main runway, across from the spot where 747s reversed their engines at four in the morning a few times each week. The air- and ear-shattering sound of those 747s rolled us all out of bed, until we sort of acclimated to it.
Our humble one-story building was officially described as a barracks, though it was anything but military-looking. The front and rear walls of the building consisted entirely of louvered glass panels from roof to the ground, faced with rat and mosquito screens. The screens were in poor condition which had trapped more than a few geckos between them, where they remained, along with huge cockroaches and other insects in various states of decay.
A small part of our first day involved removing the decaying wildlife and repairing the screens.
NCAR had constructed a new building on the airport grounds as our work area. With its new cement pad, and in particular its central air conditioning, it was the envy of the island.
One part of the building was for inflating and weighing launch balloons, suspended in two 20-foot-long bays. (You weigh something that’s lighter than air by attaching fixed, precisely measured weights to it, and then weigh the combined balloon and weights which allows you to derive the exact amount of helium in the balloon, and this, combined with precisely weighing the flight train components, achieves having them all fly at the same atmospheric pressure level.)
The superpressure balloons at launch looked like wrinkly upside-down teardrops, but at altitude (150 millibars, well over 40,000 feet) they became smooth spheres with a diameter of 11.5 feet.
Superpressure balloon lifting off of the launch vehicle
The electronics area of the building was for testing the various components (pressure & temperature sensors, radio altimeter, solar panel, control modules, and a transmitter to send data to Nimbus 6). The top instrument in the flight-train was a ‘cut-down,’ which measured the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field. When all the components were connected into a flight train it was 71 feet long, not including the superpressure balloon. The instruments were separated by enough distance so that, as the balloon ascended, a jet engine could eat one or two instruments without suffering damage.
Farther along in the launch—most of the flight train and the superpressure balloon are already outside the frame.
Jim on the rough basalt Southern coast of Tutuila.
And if a balloon wandered too far north, the cut-down would generate an electric current to melt a small connector joining the balloon to the electronics, causing the flight train to drop and the balloon to ascend till it tore apart. The cut-down was necessary because we didn’t have overflight permission from China or Russia (Cold War and all), and in any event, this phase of the project focused on the tropics.
Ron testing a data encoder prior to it being added to the flight train.
Our group’s task was to test all the components, assemble them into the flight train, and launch 1-3 platforms a day depending on weather conditions. The launches were the most fun.
Most of the time there was a healthy breeze blowing, and getting a balloon and instruments safely into the air could be tricky. If the wind direction allowed it, we’d occasionally get to use the 9000-foot main runway, but if the wind changed direction even that runway could get exciting.
We usually launched on an older, shorter, ancillary runway. Marcel always drove the launch vehicle, which had what looked like a sawed-off horizontal 50-gallon drum as a nose, containing a large, red, spherical pilot balloon tethered to the vehicle with a 10-15 foot cord. When we got to what we hoped was our the correct up-wind position, Marcel would pop the pilot balloon out of the drum and then, while looking up, drive at whatever speed and direction was required to stay directly under it, which achieved the zero relative wind speed we needed to do the launch. Of course both the wind direction and speed were constantly changing so Marcel needed to look straight up to steer under wherever the pilot balloon was going at the same time keeping an eye on our position on the runway to make sure he wasn’t driving us past the apron and out over the rocky seawall into the ocean—the Pago runways extended well into water with the Pacific Ocean to the south, and the Pala Lagoon to the north.
On Marcel’s command we’d activate an electric winch that quickly ripped open the 15-foot-long plastic sheet holding down the superpressure balloon. Once this balloon was ‘out of the bag’ there was no turning back—our daily game of playing chicken with Mother Nature was on.
It would take us two or three minutes, depending on how smoothly and how quickly we could release, hand-over-hand, the superpressure balloon’s line connecting it to the flight train , and then lift out the 10 instruments from their foam rubber compartments in the launch tray. There was no such thing as pulling the balloon and instruments back in if we ran out of room on the runway—everything would be lost.
Ascending superpressure balloon carrying ten instruments (some hard to see at this angle). The launch vehicle’s pilot balloon is also visible above and to the left of the superpressure balloon—the pilot balloon is untethered just as the superpressure balloon begins to emerge from its enclosure, in order to avoid them getting tangled up.
Ms. Nature of course didn’t give a hoot about the outcome of each launch, but NCAR scientists and staff were betting huge amounts of invested money, time, and professional careers on successfully injecting sufficient platforms into the upper atmosphere, and doing so quickly enough to satisfy the experimental parameters of the project.
The plan was, from about June into August, to launch over 100 platforms per launch-site into the tropical atmosphere, so as to continuously capture hundreds of platforms worth of wind speed and direction, temperature, and altitude data for the tropical 150 millibar pressure level. Each time the Nimbus 6 satellite passed overhead it would receive each platform’s dataset.
On a personal level those of us on the launch vehicles in Pago, Accra (Ghana), and Ascension Island (mid-Atlantic Ridge between South America and Africa) had the responsibility of getting those platforms up and operational—everything depended on it—yet it couldn’t be denied the actual game of chicken we were playing during launch was a bit outrageous and exhilarating.
We did have a few failed launches, especially in the beginning, but then we really got going.
Until, that is, Russian MiGs started shooting platforms down.
This because a few of the platforms somehow wandered into the Northern Hemisphere without the cut-downs scuttling them. This international incident resulted in the State Department shutting us down in mid-August until we could analyze what was going wrong, and fix it. It didn’t help that by then a lot of platforms were already aloft.
While NCAR scientists were working on understanding and correcting the problem with the cut-downs (fluxgate magnetometers btw), the rest of us were on hold, free to wander.
Jerry and I decided it would be interesting to wander over to the island of Ta’u, about 60 miles east of Tutuila. Ta’u was one of the three Manu’a Islands, also part of American Samoa.
At the time, Ta’u was undeveloped: South Pacific Island Airways flew from Tutuila to Ta’u primarily to bring supplies and to ferry Samoans back and forth, using a grass and gravel landing strip. We’d heard that the local population did not welcome visits from people with long hair, and might not let us get off the plane.
To see if this was true, Jerry and I drove to the main police station in Pago to see if in fact we’d be permitted on Ta’u. When we got there, our query resulted in our being brought to the Chief of Police, Tufele F. Lia. He spoke English about as well as we spoke Samoan, but with the help of an assistant who spoke only a little English, he seemed to indicate it was ok to go there. He gave us a hand-written note, in Samoan, and the verbal instruction to give it to someone named Falamaota in the village of Ta’u on the western shore of the island.
Thus armed with some sort of official permission, we bought tickets to Ta’u. We thought the note we were carrying from Tufele F. Lia was basically a ‘hall pass’ to keep us from getting thrown off the island.
It was something more than that.
To be continued…