An experimental investigation of small‐scale atmospheric turbulence is presented. Airborne measurements were made in the vicinity of the meterological tower of Brookhaven National Laboratory. Hot‐wire probes mounted on the right wing tip of a Cherokee aircraft were used. The anemometer signals were recorded on an analog tape recorder in the aircraft after differentiation and filtering; they were digitized in the laboratory with a high‐speed analog‐to‐digital converter, and recorded on magnetic tape. All data were processed with an IBM‐360. A fast Fourier transform program was used to compute the spectra. The average Kolmogoroff constant computed from the small‐scale spectra was&agr; = 2.0. The cospectra and quadrature spectra of the small‐scale turbulence were virtually zero. The skewness and kurtosis of∂ui/∂x(the derivative of a velocity vector with respect to the coordinate in the direction of aircraft heading) ranged from ‐0.03 to ‐0.50 and from 4.5 to 14, respectively, at Reynolds number(R&lgr;)from 2280 to 5330. The spectra of(∂ui/∂x)2were found to exhibit a ‐0.3 power law in the inertial subrange. The probability distribution of(∂ui/∂x)2was nearly a straight line in log‐normal coordinates.