Bill Kornell has spent most of his half-century-long career flying into bad weather. A former bull-riding champion, the sinewy 80-year-old has been a pilot since the 1960s, when he realised that travelling to far-flung rodeo towns across the American West was more efficient by plane than by car. After an injury in the late 1970s, Kornell left the bull-riding circuit and took a job as a bush pilot, ferrying supplies and commuters deep into the Alaskan interior. Flying in the Arctic presented a host of challenges: bad weather, freezing temperatures and poor visibility.
Those hazards pale in comparison with the rigours of his current job. For the past three years, Kornell has been trying to make it snow. When he’s called to action by his employer, North American Weather Consultants, Kornell hops into a two-engine Cessna 414. Minutes later the tiny aeroplane, its wings and fuselage covered in dozens of ungainly metal tubes, is soaring through bucking turbulence above Salt Lake City, Utah. Kornell does not avoid the roiling storms that mass along the high peaks of the Wasatch mountains, but flies directly into them, releasing a chemical solution into the clouds.
Proponents of this technique, known as cloud-seeding, believe that it can increase precipitation by around 10%. In the drought-stricken American West, cloud-seeding is used in the hope of making snow, which, when it melts, feeds rivers and reservoirs. The aim is to trigger a stormfront to release snow over an entire mountain range. | | |
