Treasures from the past

During our New Year's break I came across a few rather nice magazines of a bygone era - absolute treasures for the stories and adverts they contain. I thought I would share this article, named "They must land safely" from Popular Mechanics of March, 1949, so almost 70 years ago. It describes a then new landing system called FIDO ("fog intensive, dispersal of" - which one would imagine means that the acronym came before the labored explanation) for LAX. At a cost of a little less than $1M, a 6000' (2km) long wall of 6' (2m) high flames was produced using oil burners to burn off the local fog when it became hard to fly into LAX. Certainly a very innovative method of raising the ceiling to 300' in 3 minutes - I can't even imagine the noise and the stench in the area, nor the view from the windows as you're coming in to land!

It makes me cringe to think what such a system would do for climate change, and it is obviously not something we'd be very likely to even consider, let alone implement in this day and age. Between VOR, ILS, and now GPS systems there fortunately is little need.

Other notes of interest are that LAX had a single main runway (you can see it in the image) - of course at this point there are four of them with a need for expansion - and that there were 200 scheduled transport operations per day. The average today is 1578 scheduled flights.

Oh by the way - the hole in the page? The original owner of the magazine was very much into shooting, and we have his WWI uniform with a "Marksman" badge on it. I rather suspect he decided to use it to do an experiment with one of his guns.