When a Team of Meteorologists and Combat Pilots Set Out to Understand Thunderstorms, They Made Flying Safer for Everyone

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America at 250: The Revolutionary Spark

A Smithsonian magazine special report

Science | Summer 2026

When a Team of Meteorologists and Combat Pilots Set Out to Understand Thunderstorms, They Made Flying Safer for Everyone

The sky was a very dangerous place in the early days of commercial aviation. By flying into storms to learn how they worked, these experts made air travel and weather forecasting much more predictable

Lightning strikes in Peckham, Oklahoma.<br>Mitch Dobrowner

Lightning strikes in Peckham, Oklahoma.<br>Mitch Dobrowner

The 22 passengers who boarded Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 19 out of Washington, D.C. on August 31, 1940, would have had little reason to worry about arriving safely at their final destination. It had been 17 months since the last fatal commercial airline accident in the United States, a record at the time. The flight’s captain, Lowell V. Scroggins, had 11,000 hours of flying experience, more than seven times what the Federal Aviation Administration now requires for airline pilot certification. And the aircraft, a rugged DC-3, the era’s quintessential airliner, had flown in that morning from Detroit without incident; the day before, it had undergone a routine inspection of its propellers, wings, radios and all other critical equipment. Even its interior had received a good scrub and polish. Just before 2:30 p.m., Flight 19 fired up its twin 1,100-horsepower engines and began its ascent.

About 55 miles northwest, in Lovettsville, Virginia, Dorothy Everhart was tinkering in her home when suddenly, according to an incident report later compiled by the newly established Civil Aeronautics Board, she heard what she thought was lightning strike her house. Everhart shut off the electricity and stepped onto the back porch. To the west, she could see black clouds assembling over a clump of mountains. A lone airplane was headed straight into the storm. Everhart lived along a well-trafficked flight route, and she was accustomed to airplanes overhead, but this plane was flying “lower than most of them go,” she recalled. Then a brilliant flash bleached the sky, momentarily blinding her, but she couldn’t miss an “awful roaring.”

Another Lovettsville resident, Lydia Jacobs, heard the strike, too, followed by a sound resembling a “scream” or a “siren.” When Jacobs peeked out her window, she saw a streak of fire shooting across the clouds. Flight 19 appeared to Jacobs as “a burnt-up building floating through the air.” Within moments, Flight 19 plunged to the ground and slammed into a nearby alfalfa field, where it was demolished on impact, killing everyone on board.

At the time, Flight 19 was the deadliest commercial airline accident in American history. But it was not unique. Soon after Flight 19, a string of fatal accidents followed. On November 4, 1940, a DC-3 flying from Oakland, California, to Salt Lake City was caught in a snowstorm and struck a mountain, killing all ten people on board. A month later, a DC-3 stalled out while trying to land in overcast and icy conditions in Chicago, killing all three crew members and seven of its 13 passengers. On January 23, 1941, a DC-3 crashed after an aborted landing during bad weather in St. Louis, where one passenger and one crew member died. The next month, five passengers and three crew members aboard a DC-3 en route to Georgia were killed while landing in rain and fog.

The wreckage of Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 19 after a lightning strike.

NOAA

Mechanical errors, delays, detours and cancel-lations were common in those days, but no threat was greater to commercial air travel than the weather. Scientists knew that clouds could be turbulent environments, but there was little guidance for pilots about how to navigate through them, and meteorological forecasting was still a primitive science. Pilots would take off expecting smooth rides only to stumble into dark clouds: At best, the consequences might be a misadventure through stormy skies that left passengers nauseated (in the 1930s, airliners were routinely hosed down between flights); at worst, the results were catastrophic.

Flight 19 happened to be carrying Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, and its crash and the many accidents that followed spurred American government officials into action. In March 1941, Oklahoma Representative Jack Nichols assumed the chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate Air Accidents. The committee investigated for the next two years, compiling a series of reports that together amounted to 15 cubic feet of paperwork. Throughout, the evidence highlighted a pervasive and exceedingly familiar natural force: thunderstorms. In fact, thunderstorms were later found to be responsible for 56 airplane accidents between 1938 and 1945, a staggering...