Forecasting in Victoria, July-October 1943

From the weather room I was posted to Essendon Airport, in those days an extremely busy station for both service and commercial aircraft movements. This was a great challenge in days when commercial aircraft, in particular, had to achieve a rather delicate balance between weight of fuel and weight of passengers and freight. They would pay particular attention to our forecast of upper winds, choosing the level most favourable for the flight in those terms. They would then determine with the operations officers their estimated times of arrival (ETA) at their destinations, and we forecasters would anxiously await radio information which would show how accurate our forecast of the upper winds had been. One evening, I believe in September 1943, I was mortified to find that an ANA aircraft flying from Essendon to Parafield near Adelaide arrived 19 minutes after his ETA. The next day a senior captain of the airline visited me to discuss my forecast, and I expected some remonstrance. To my surprise he congratulated me on the general accuracy of my forecast of the severity of a front the aircraft would encounter somewhere before crossing the border into South Australia. When I admitted my chagrin that he had been unable to achieve his ETA, he assured me that the most important thing that night was to know the critical conditions he would face. He then asked me to detail how I had made that successful forecast, and I was able to expound some of the theory and practice Doug Forder had imparted to us, and to say how valuable was the daily research information, called AMFA (Air-mass and Frontal Analysis), sent to us in code by the Weather Bureau.

Bureau of Meteorology