The Science Project I Never Did

I grew up in a rather narrow canyon, with the mountains rising high enough for the sun to set at about 4 p.m. (2 p.m. in the winter).  There were many beautiful things to look at, so I'm not entirely sure why I loved to watch airplane trails so much.  They took off from some city far away; they would land in Los Angeles or Toronto, maybe.

The planes would appear from behind the mountain, a little silver speck followed by a white line.  It would make its way half way across the sky to the other horizon before any sound, and then that low whispering-like sound would come. I'd make a low whistle to myself in the back of my throat (that's how it sounds, I'd think to myself).

One day I was going to do a project for the science fair that had to do with those planes. The trick was to get to know 3 things:

1) Where was the plane coming from?

2) Where was it going?

3) Was it on time?

In order to do this I would need to get really good with a compass.  I would plot out where I was sitting, where the plane come into sight and where it would leave my sight.  I'd find out how high a plane that small must be. Armed with that information, I'd be able to calculate the exact direction it was going.  Then I'd look at a map and see which cities appeared to be connected with the line I'd come up with for the plane's path.

Then there would be some phone calls and letters to the airline public relations offices.  What kind of plane am I looking at?  How fast does a jet like that go?  If I could get that, I could guess that it maybe took off from Kansas City at 8 or 9 a.m., headed for Las Vegas.  Or maybe it came from Minneapolis and was headed for Phoenix.

The experiment would become gradually more successful, and would be measured when a plane didn't appear at the predicted time.  I'd call the airline in Kansas City and say, "Flight 306 for Las Vegas was cancelled today, huh?"

The old folks would have been pretty impressed.  That really would have been cool. But it would have been a lot of work too - not more work than feeding squirrels, or climbing trees, or digging for old bottles, or playing pinball, or riding my bike up the pass.  It just wouldn't have been appropriate work for a little kid.  My agenda was already full, but the science fair project was always somewhere on the second page of my to-do list, somewhere down around "kiss a girl" or "learn to play violin."

See that jet stream?  That wide one?  That plane went behind the mountain 45 minutes ago.  I wasn't watching or listening, but I know these things.

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