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The St. Louis Arch: A Magnet for Aircraft
Posted by Failed Success on 03/29/06 at 03:37 PM
This has been a closely held secret for many years; ever since the Arch was completed and opened for business in 1967, as a matter of fact. Lord knows how many young pilots have been sucked into it. Mathematicians more familiar with slack chains attached to a pair of gate posts can tell you more about catenary curves than I can. The Arch happens to be an inverted catenary curve, and that’s partially responsible for the great attraction it had for old aviators who gave up flying for a living back in the days of aviation gasoline rationing in the ‘70’s, when due to scarcity it became too expensive to burn in our engines. Now, with the prices of airplanes gone sky high, and the gas prices tripled, it’s a rare, warm day in winter when we fly at all, much less get close enough to that Arch to feel its pull. Those of you familiar with the Arch’s sinister history of weather control might want to read on.
Herr Von Braun didn’t invent the curve, he merely pushed its envelope a tad, which wasn’t all bad; certainly not as bad as building rocket propelled bombs to blast Britain. It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see how the catenary curve, with a push and shove here and there can be bent into an hyperbolic curve, or tale, such as one I recently read. It is both the art and tradition of story tellers to stretch the truth a mite, while keeping their tale believable; I have no quarrel with that, and sometimes do it myself when writing fiction. But when it comes down to an article of faith, a straight line is always the shortest distance between the beginning and end, with just a taste of embellishment somewhere around the middle. All the talk about changing the weather around St. Louis with that Arch is just that sort of believable hyperbola that I enjoy now and then. The folks who build arches have plenty of time, and oodles of money to spend on ornamental, non-functional, monuments. But folks who lay pipelines to transport oil and gasoline clear across the continent tend to prefer straight lines. The Explorer pipeline, a monumental project itself, follows a path as straight as the terrain and the powers of eminent domain would allow. One of the Explorer’s terminals just happens to be in East St. Louis, just across the river from that exaggerated MacDonald’s arch which casts its spell on airplanes and pilots alike. At a time in the distant past, I was so hard up for a flying job that I took one flying aerial patrols along the Explorer Pipeline for a company down in Texas. It was my job to fly from Hammond, Indiana southwest above the right of way to spot leaks, or disgruntled farmers whose lands had been divided without their consent to make room for the Explorer Pipeline. Not unlike the angry folks in Iraq who periodically blast the pipelines in their country, which our troops have occupied for the past three years, some of our own farmers, tired of having their pastures and corn fields split up into uneconomical triangular parcels by the government, had threatened to blow up the Explorer. Although no bombs ever went off to my knowledge, I had to keep an eye open, just in case. So I flew down the Explorer right of way as low as the law allowed (which I might add was a ton of fun on a cold winter’s day). After crossing the East St. Louis terminal, I would fly down the eastern levee to the place where the pipeline crosses the muddy Mississippi submerged, looking for oil slicks where it might have been nicked by a passing vessel dragging its anchor. From the river crossing, the Explorer Pipeline was bent every which way, so that’s the way I had to fly the plane. From the ground, folks could look up and read the sign painted on the underside of my wings: “PIPELINE—PATROL.” Doubtless some of those folks on the ground thought the pilot flying the plane, was drunk as a sailor on shore leave. One morning, just about sunrise, I felt something either pushing or pulling the old Cessna Sky Hawk to the west, just as I was approaching the East St. Louis refineries. Try as I might to control my direction of flight, I found myself flying across the mighty river and aimed at the dead centerat the Old Court House between the two leaning legs of that stainless steel Arch.
Since I couldn’t seem to change the direction the airplane had chosen, as if flying on automatic pilot, I sat back and enjoyed the view. Of course it took only seconds, flying at 150 knots ground speed, and I was through the Arch and heading straight for the verdigris dome of the Old Court House. Luckily for me and for that old monument to Dred Scott, the power of the Arch had relaxed its grip on my plane. But I had to shove the throttle to the firewall and haul back on the yoke to clear the cupola that stands on top of the dome. I reckon I had a hundred or more feet of air between the flagpole and the skin on the bottom of my fuselage, when I passed that pole. As I flew on my way, toward the Ozarks and Oklahoma, I puzzled over the strange force of attraction that old arch exerted on my plane, which was made almost entirely of aluminum. But I never solved the mystery. I only mentioned it to give younger, more scientific minds something to ponder. It only happened once, out of all those time I flew past the Arch. So I figured it must have been like a case of German Measles; once you’ve had ‘em, you are ever after immune. What ever affinity that plane had for the stainless steel of the arch that one time, its polarity had forever changed and the force of attraction became one of repulsion. Article Written by: OldMack © 3/29/06
Learn more about the St. Louis Arch at Wikipedia
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Young aviation enthusiasts in the St. Louis area should be aware that the Arch is an airplane magnet.
The catenary curve, has more uses than the design of monumental arches. The leading edges of old, slow airplanes had that shape, though it was structurally sound, it was inefficient and tended to gather ice when flown through sub-freezing fogs above the rivers that have their confluence near STL. That curve, inverted, may have influenced Gravity’s Rainbow, so cleverly written by Thomas Pynchon; who based a fine tale on the trail of smoke following the German V-2 rockets designed by Herr Werner Von Braun, a Nazi scientist smuggled into this country to design weapons for the Cold War era and vehicles for launching men to the moon.
Well, it was nothing to worry about. The thing is more than six hundred feet wide at its base, and there’s six hundred or more feet of air space between the grounds of Jefferson Park and the top of the Arch.