On 9 February 2017, a new retro red and black aircraft livery was launched, to coincide with Air Canada’s 80th anniversary and Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation. One influential Black pastor said he thinks the new law is unreasonable and that his church will use it to fire up voters. Of the many things that can go wrong during a balloon launch, leaving a trail of destruction is obviously one of the worst. To prepare a balloon for launch, a technician will first secure the balloon to a nozzle and begin filling it with helium or hydrogen. However, hydrogen is also very flammable — a fact that has prompted many explosion-shy weather stations to adopt helium instead. The balloons are filled either with helium or hydrogen depending on the preferences of the individual launch station. Hydrogen is cheaper, has better lifting capacity, and can be easily extracted from water. Can you guess why? Why let radiosondes have all the fun? That’s why each weather balloon has a small parachute connected to the cord joining the radiosonde to the balloon. As soon as the balloon begins to float, the radiosonde gets to work, beaming data to weather computers on the ground.

In real time, these computers plot the data into three-dimensional weather models and send them to weather stations across the country. Sending helicopters to pick up almost 200 weather balloons launched in the United States each day simply isn’t in the budget. Japanese propaganda reported that the balloons had killed 10,000 Americans, but in reality, the only mayhem caused was the death of six people. The relative cheapness of weather balloons is what has kept them the go-to device for recording weather data for more than six decades. In the waning days of World War II, the Japanese military strapped bombs to the bottom of weather balloons and sent them floating toward Canada and the United States. The most high-profile case was in July 1947, when military officials in Roswell, N.M., stunned the world with reports that they had recovered the remains of a “flying disk.” Later, however, government reports showed that the debris was from a top secret experimental balloon used to monitor Soviet nuclear tests.

As it fills, he tests the radiosonde’s battery, tunes the radio equipment and attaches the whole assembly together with a length of nylon cord. Ground technicians, meanwhile, track the rising balloon with radar equipment. The radiosonde also has a low-powered radio transmitter to relay data from all three instruments back to receivers on the ground. The balloon can only expand so much, however, and it will typically burst at altitudes above 15 miles (24.1 kilometers) — about three times higher than Mount Everest. Abnormal electrolyte levels can give the doctor clues about a number of illnesses. In this automotive quiz, we’ve taken a selection of car modifications from both the aesthetic side and the performance side, to give you the best of both worlds. Walking the balloon a short distance clear of trees, power lines and other obstacles, he’ll simply give it a gentle push upward. The location was perfect for a balloon launch: flat, dry and clear. Swim in areas where the water is clear and the banks are well groomed, and never swim alone.

With so many thousands of weather balloons crowding the skies, it’s inevitable that some are mistaken for alien spacecraft. If it’s not equipped with proper parachutes, an amateur weather balloon can become a deadly projectile if it falls in an urban area. During a meteor shower, a high-altitude balloon can collect cosmic dust emitted by the passing space rocks. The balloons could also provoke a disaster by getting sucked into the jet engines of a passing airliner. Jet propulsion occurs when fuel is burned in the presence of oxygen from the atmosphere, creating a stream of expanding gases that, when expelled through a nozzle, generates thrust. The system also generates up to 400MW of electrical power, depending on rainfall, most of which is sent to San Francisco via city-owned power lines. Before the balloon was fully inflated, however, a sudden gust of wind caught the balloon and sent it hurtling across the countryside. If balloons catch a particularly strong gust of wind, they can travel several hundred miles — touching down anywhere from a marshy bog to the snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains. By noting the sideways movement of the ascending balloon, they can calculate wind speed and wind direction at different altitudes.