  We investigate the marginal distribution of the bottom eigenvalues of the
stochastic Airy operator when the inverse temperature $\beta$ tends to $0$. We
prove that the minimal eigenvalue, whose fluctuations are governed by the
Tracy-Widom $\beta$ law, converges weakly, when properly centered and scaled,
to the Gumbel distribution. More generally we obtain the convergence in law of
the marginal distribution of any eigenvalue with given index $k$. Those
convergences are obtained after a careful analysis of the explosion times
process of the Riccati diffusion associated to the stochastic Airy operator. We
show that the empirical measure of the explosion times converges weakly to a
Poisson point process using estimates proved in [L. Dumaz and B. Vir\'ag. Ann.
Inst. H. Poincar\'e Probab. Statist. 49, 4, 915-933, (2013)]. We further
compute the empirical eigenvalue density of the stochastic Airy ensemble on the
macroscopic scale when $\beta\to 0$. As an application, we investigate the
maximal eigenvalues statistics of $\beta_N$-ensembles when the repulsion
parameter $\beta_N\to 0$ when $N\to +\infty$. We study the double scaling limit
$N\to +\infty, \beta_N \to 0$ and argue with heuristic and numerical arguments
that the statistics of the marginal distributions can be deduced following the
ideas of [A. Edelman and B. D. Sutton. J. Stat. Phys. 127, 6, 1121-1165 (2007)]
and [J. A. Ram\'irez, B. Rider and B. Vir\'ag. J. Amer. Math. Soc. 24, 919-944
(2011)] from our later study of the stochastic Airy operator.
