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In 1979, I was a young scientist working in monsoon research, and the Global Weather Experiment was a thrilling opportunity. I had just finished, about three years prior, a Ph.D. dissertation at MIT, advised by Jule Charney, on the dynamics of the same monsoon storms that I was now observing from an airplane. To write it, I had relied solely on data collected over land, the only kind available at the time. When I was named the chief scientist of MONEX's Bay of Bengal field experiment, I didn't feel like a kid let loose in a candy store—I felt like a kid who had just been handed the deed to the candy store itself.

But it wasn't just the monsoon research that excited me. I was also hard at work on proving a hypothesis that many in my field dismissed as an impossibility—I believed that, in addition to predicting the weather five and ten days in advance, we could also predict monthly and seasonal averages. Long-term seasonal prediction, as I envisioned it, would not only improve lives around the world but also save them. Floods foreseen—famines prevented. No longer would the weather's volatile whims sneak up on society's poorest and most vulnerable, people like the ones I had grown up alongside.

I knew that the reams of data recorded during the Global Weather Experiment would certainly play an important role in this dream. In July 1979, about one hundred fifty of us—scientists from universities and federal agencies, students, flight crews, project managers, journalists, and archivists—gathered in a Calcutta airport hotel for the month. For two weeks we planned out field experiments and for two more we performed intensive observations, flying our borrowed airplanes every day that an enticing monsoon depression formed. After each day of flights, the scientists gathered in a charmless conference room and studied the map—hand-drawn back then—that the MONEX data had so far created. We'd surmise and theorize about what had happened and why, a warm-up for the long years of analysis that lay ahead. In a little over twelve months, we would gather again to present papers on what MONEX had taught us.

I doubt anyone enjoyed the month more than I did: I was a monsoon-obsessed scientist in his beloved home country, delighted to be reunited with the sights and sounds of India—the familiar rhythms of Hindi songs that filled the city streets, the smell of hot oil and fried bread, the cooling monsoon rains that came down in sheets.

Of course, complex scientific endeavors like the Global Weather Experiment look one way in a planning meeting and quite another on the ground, and there certainly was no shortage of mishaps, tension, and drama during our four weeks in Calcutta.

Most of the time that I wasn't in the airplane, I was plotting out the next day's flight path while watching intently for any pop-up storms. My fellow scientists and I were eager to be in the sky as much as possible, and I'm afraid that we badgered our pilot more than we should have about getting us up there. Some colleagues had warned me that he could be overly cautious, this former NASA pilot, and within days, his behavior had confirmed that. He told us his flight crew needed rest, the plane needed daily maintenance, conditions were too rough—but these excuses did little to quell our zeal to be airborne. There were only so many weeks that we had the personnel and equipment in place to do our work, and each wasted moment was an underdeveloped forecast, an unwritten dissertation.

There were worse tragedies too. During a lull in our work, some members of our group decided to visit the Calcutta weather department, where recently installed radar systems were gathering all sorts of exciting information. Finding the building among the twisting, sardine-can-narrow streets of the city turned out to be an hours-long challenge, especially as they received wildly inaccurate directions from a number of well-meaning Calcuttans (Indians are much too polite to ever say "I don't know" to a person looking for help). When they finally arrived, my scientist friends were dismayed to find that the radar equipment had been turned off. The Indian meteorologists who greeted them assured them it was for the good of the electronics. "The radar needs to rest for a few hours," they said, confoundingly.

Meanwhile, I was fielding requests from Westerners in our group who wanted to sightsee in a city that wasn't nearly as excited to see them as they were to see it. At the time, West Bengal was under Communist control, and American visitors were immediately flagged as potential spies. The US embassy had counseled traveling scientists to keep a low profile, and I had to constantly warn my colleagues away from late-night excursions and forays into bars.

In fact, on one of the first days of our field experiments, after we flew an airplane into a severe thunderstorm for the good of mankind, the newspapers in Calcutta reported only that we had dropped drop- sondes and fuel into the Bay of Bengal. "Americans Pollute Bay," the headlines read.

A lot had changed in the eighteen years between Kennedy's UN speech and the execution of the Global Weather Experiment, but some deficiencies—technological acumen and diplomatic relations among them—had clearly persisted.

And then, of course, there was the matter of the cracked windshield.

After about ten minutes and a couple of nervously eaten mangoes, we finally saw the silhouette of Calcutta appear on the horizon. The fuel streaming from the side of the plane had slowed to a trickle, but my heart was still knocking against my chest. Everyone but Joach remained fearful and silent.

Joach—who had lived for years at the tops of some of the world's tallest peaks studying the behavior of air masses in those terrains, who had flown sailplanes straight into vicious winter storms, who had prepared none other than Alan Shepard for his journey into space—remained exasperatingly serene.

"Have I ever told you about the Gigant?" he called out over the drone of the engine. He had. During World War II, Joach had been flight-testing the aircraft—the world's largest at the time—when it broke apart at twenty-six thousand feet. Now didn't seem like the ideal moment for him to retell the story, but Joach didn't wait for me to say so. "My parachute wouldn't open until I was at maybe two hundred meters. Now, that was a close one!"