frightening. They are traveling in all directions, not in just one, and
they break against each other, dashing salt spray high into the air.
It's all too close.
"Now the ceiling is lifting and we are climbing--250, 300, 500, 700 and
we level off. It grows less turbulent and Observer Mays looks up from
his deep concentration.
"'I may be wrong,' he says, 'but it looks to me as if it's made a little
curve toward the north.'
"Which is very interesting--but more interesting is the fact that the
day's work is over and we're on our way home."
In 1947, the Air Forces were assigning B-29's to their Kindley Base at
Bermuda, to replace the B-17's. The big superforts had room for guests
and it soon became common to have somebody hanging around Kindley to get
a ride. When a big storm was spotted east of the Windward Islands on the
eleventh of September of that year, two newspaper reporters and a
photographer from _Life_ Magazine, Francis Miller, were waiting at
Bermuda for a hop. The big hurricane became even more violent as it
turned toward the southwest and swept across Florida. It was September
14th when Milt Sosin of the Miami _Daily News_ got his "hairy hop" in
this same blow. As it crossed the coast, winds of full hurricane force
stretched over a distance of 240 miles and the wind reached 155 miles an
hour at Hillsboro Light. By this time the hurricane hunters were fully
occupied and the riders were left on the ground. Miami communication
lines were wiped out and control of the hunters had been shifted to
Washington. In charge of a B-17 at Bermuda was Major Hawley. His
co-pilot was Captain Dunn, who had learned hurricane hunting in
"Kappler's Hurricane" and other earlier storms. Late on the seventeenth,
as the storm roared across Florida with night closing in, Hawley had
heard nothing from Washington about his plane going into it, so he gave
up and told the riders to come back in the morning.
Early the next morning, one of the reporters, a staff writer for the
Bermuda _Royal Gazette_, was sitting around in his shorts and thinking
about breakfast when Lieutenant Cronin rushed in and said they were
ready to take off. The reporter started to get dressed, but Cronin said,
"Let's go. Just as you are. You may drown but you won't freeze." They
stopped in Hamilton, got the other reporter and the photographer, and
found Hawley walking up and down, impatiently waiting for last
instructions. So the reporter took a trip of 3,350 miles in his shorts
and had a bird's-eye view of the southern Seaboard, the Atlantic Ocean
and Gulf of Mexico and a bad-acting hurricane.
It was a "hairy hop." They had orders to refuel at Mobile, so they put
down at the airfield there, all other planes having been evacuated the
day before. An Air Force man came out and asked, "Where you goin'?" They
told him and he turned around and shouted, "Some dang fools think they
have a kite and can fly through a hurricane." More men came out and they
got gas in the plane. One big fellow said, "You can have your dern trip.
But keep the storm away from here." In twenty minutes they were in the
storm. The crew members were bare to the waist, perspiration pouring
down, water coming through the panel joints, and everything was wet and
shaking. One of the reporters described it this way:
"Suddenly the plane keeled over on one side, the left wing tip dipped
down vertically, and for a moment I thought the end had come. I gulped
for breath as the plane dropped. The sea rushed up towards us; huge
waves reared up and mocked us, clawing up at the wing tip as if trying
to swallow us in one. A greater burst from the engines, a hovering
sensation for a second and then, with the whole plane shuddering under
the strain, our nose once again tilted upward. I felt weak and with
difficulty breathed again."
The plane had no radar and the crew had a lot of trouble trying to
locate the center of the hurricane. The forecasters at Miami were
anxious for an accurate position of the center. At that time airborne
radars were being installed as standard equipment as rapidly as they
could get around to it but the B-17's came last. Low pressure guided
them, and they were trying to get into the part of the hurricane where
they found the pressure falling rapidly. It was a big storm and they
were having little luck in the search. "Lashed by winds and rain, the
B-17 staggered across the sky," one of the reporters said afterward. He
went on to tell his story:
"I was growing sick in the bomb aimer's bay stretched over a pile of
parachutes and hanging onto the navigator's chair for dear life. Some
baggage, roped down beforehand, now lay strewn across the gangway.
Parachutes, life jackets, water cans and camera cases were thrown about
into heaps. The photographer, trying in vain to take pictures out of the
window, was knocked down and sent flying across the fuselage. His arms
were bruised from repeated efforts. My stomach was everywhere but where
it should have been. Everything went black. The plane was thrown from
side to side and the floor under my feet dropped. We emerged from a big
cloud into an eerie and uncanny pink half-light. The photographer
clambered from the floor and tried to look out. He thought the reddish
light was an engine on fire.
"Before we touched down at Tampa, after four hours of flying around in
the hurricane, we reporters and the photographer were exhausted. And
even then they had failed to get into the calm center, although they had
sent back to Washington a lot of useful information on the storm's
position."
More than anything else, the preliminaries unnerve the guest rider. They
tell him about the "ditching" procedures; that is, what to do if the
plane is on the verge of settling down on the raging sea. Two or three
hours before take-off they are likely to have a ditching drill, along
with the briefing on the storm and the check on the equipment. The guest
is told that if they bail out, he will go through a forward bomb bay
door. There is hollow laughter as someone makes it clear that there is
very little chance of survival. But they want the guest to have every
advantage.
Commander N. Brango of Navy reconnaissance says: "Yes, we get a good
many requests from men who want to go along. Would you like to go on an
eight- to ten-hour flight in a four-engine, thirty-ton, Navy patrol
plane? You will probably see some of the beautifully lush islands of the
Antilles chain, waters shading gradually from pale green to a deep clear
emerald, shining white coral beaches, native villages buried in tropical
jungles, and many other sights usually referred to in the travel
advertisements.
"Doesn't that sound enticing? There is just one catch. You may have to
spend four to five hours of your flight-time shuddering and shaking
around in the aircraft like an ice cube in a cocktail shaker, with rain
driving into a hundred previously undiscovered leaks in the plane and
thence down the nearest neck. You may bump your head, or other more
padded portions of your anatomy, on various and sundry projecting pieces
of metal (of which there seem to be at least a million). You may not be
able to see much of anything, at times, since it will be raining so hard
that your horizontal visibility will be nil, or you may be able to catch
glimpses, straight down about 300 feet, of mountainous waves and an
ocean being torn apart by winds of 90 to 150 miles per hour. There's one
thing I will guarantee you, you won't be writing postcards to your
friends saying, 'Having a wonderful time, wish you were here,' because
you won't be able to keep the pen on paper long enough to write much of
anything."
You have guessed by now that the carefully phrased invitation was just a
trap to get you aboard one of the Navy's "Hurricane Hunter" patrol
planes as it departs on a hurricane reconnaissance mission. According to
Brango, these flights have been described by visiting correspondents,
using "thrilling," "awe-inspiring," "terrifying," and other equally
impressive adjectives. Actually, it is difficult to find words to
describe such a flight. That it is hazardous is obvious, but the feeling
that accomplishing the mission may mean the saving of many lives and
much property makes it seem worth doing--not to mention the lift
received from an occasional "well-done" from up the line.
Just to indicate to the prospective guest what it may be like, Brango
gives "Caribbean Charlie" of 1951 as an example.
Charlie was spawned several hundred miles east of the Windward Island of
Trinidad. The first notice the Navy had of its presence was a ship
reporting an area of bad weather, and almost immediately one of the
hurricane hunter planes from the advanced base in Puerto Rico was in the
air to get the first reports on Charlie. For the next nine days Charlie
led them a wild, if not a merry chase. He slipped by night through the
Windward Islands and into the Caribbean, loafed across this broad
expanse of water, then slammed into Kingston, Jamaica, dealing that city
one of its most devastating blows in history. Then Charlie headed across
the Yucatan Channel and over the Yucatan Peninsula, where he lost some
of his push. Some sixteen hours later he broke into the Gulf of Campeche
with renewed fury, stormed across the Gulf and into the Mexican coast at
Tampico, on August 22, again costing lives and millions in property
damage.
During his long rampage, he was being invaded almost daily by Navy
planes. On Tuesday, August 21, Brango had the fortune of being assigned
to the reconnaissance crew for that day.
They departed Miami at noon of a bright sunny day. For three hours they
flew over a calm ocean, flecked with sunlight. By then they could see
the looming mass of clouds ahead, which indicated Charlie's whereabouts.
Dropping from seven thousand feet cruising altitude to six hundred feet,
they started getting into the eye. The sun had disappeared and the winds
jumped rapidly to seventy miles an hour. For almost an hour they swung
around to the west and south, feeling for the weaker side, as the winds
got up to one hundred miles per hour and the rain and turbulence became
terrific for about ten minutes before they broke through the inner wall
and into the eye.
According to Brango, "The eye is a pleasant place! Many of them have
blue sky, calm seas and air smooth enough to catch up on your reports
and even drink a cup of coffee. Charlie's eye wasn't too good--big, but
cloudy; still it was better than what we had just come through, so we
hung around for about thirty-five minutes, watching the birds. There are
usually hundreds of birds in the eye of a hurricane. Probably they get
blown in there and have enough sense not to try to fly out. But not us,
we want out."
Soon the decision to start out was made, and the order went over the
inter-com: "Stand by to leave the eye--report when ready." This always
brings the stock answer, which has become a standard joke in the
squadron: "Don't worry about us mules, just load the wagon!"
The flight out was rough. Sunset was nearing, and in the storm area
night falls rapidly. For almost two hours they beat their way through
one hundred mile-per-hour winds toward the edge of the storm and in the
general direction of Corpus Christi, their destination. The turbulence
and rain on the way out were so severe that they were unable to send out
messages and position reports, so someone in the crew, catching a
glimpse of the waves beneath, came through with the scintillating remark
that "We're still lost, but we are making excellent time."
About nine hours after they had left Miami, they landed at the Naval Air
Station, Corpus Christi, Texas. An hour later they were out of their
dripping flight suits and "testing the quality of Texas draught beer."
At dawn the next morning, another crew and another plane from the
squadron was into the hurricane, only a few hours before it struck
Tampico and then swirled inland, to dissipate itself on the mountain
range to the west of that coastal city.
Shortly before the middle of September, 1948, the Weather Bureau in
Washington had a long-distance call from the Baltimore _Sun_. A staff
correspondent, Geoffrey W. Fielding, wanted to fly into a hurricane. The
Weather Bureau arranged it through General Don Yates, in charge of the
Air Weather Service, and on September 20, Fielding was authorized and
invited to proceed to Bermuda at such time as necessary between that
date and November 30, to go with one of the crews on a reconnaissance
mission. The Air Force offered transportation to Bermuda and return at
the proper time.
On the day of Fielding's call, a vicious hurricane was threatening
Bermuda and the B-29's were exploring it, but it was too late to arrange
a trip. On the thirteenth it passed a short distance east of the
islands, with winds of 140 miles an hour. The next tropical disturbance
was found in the Caribbean west of Jamaica and became a fully developed
storm on September 19. As it raked its way across the western end of
Cuba on the twentieth, and southern Florida on the twenty-first and
twenty-second, Fielding flew to Bermuda. By the time they were ready to
take off, the storm was picking up force after crossing Florida and was
headed in his direction.
Not the worrying type, Fielding made notes of everything: the ditching
tactics, the lifesavers and parachutes, sandwiches for lunch, the
weather instruments, and the exact time of take-off, 12:03 P.M., Bermuda
time. Already, high, thin cirrus clouds were seen, spreading ahead of
the storm. Southward, the clouds lowered and thickened. And then the
aircraft commander, Captain Frank Thompson, saw a tanker wallowing in
the heavy swells a quarter of a mile below, and everybody had a look.
Big seas swept over the bows of the ship and crashed on deck. The crew
of the B-29 felt sorry for the men on the tanker.
"Watch that old ship roll down there," said the pilot. "Those poor guys
may be in this a couple days. They make very little headway as the
hurricane drives toward them. I wouldn't like to be in their place." The
super fortress flew a straight course into the teeth of the hurricane
and low, ragged, rain-filled clouds soon hid the tanker from view.
Increasing winds buffeted the big aircraft, which now seemed like a
pigmy plane in this vast wind system. They were instructed to follow the
"boxing" procedure and were headed for sixty-knot winds in the northeast
sector.
Over the inter-communications suddenly came the excited voice of the
navigator, Lieutenant Chester Camp: "I've got them--there they
are--sixty-knot winds. Bring the plane around." The plane banked in a
right turn as the pilot brought the winds on the tail and shot fuel into
the engines to force the plane through winds that would become more
violent. So they started the first leg of the box.
The weather officer, Lieutenant Chester Evans, was seated in the
bomb-aimer's position in the glass nose of the plane, practically in the
teeth of the gale. In addition to keeping track of the weather, he
guided the pilots by reading the altimeters to get the height of the
plane above the sea. In spite of the jostling he was getting from the
bouncing plane, Fielding investigated these operations and wrote in his
notebook:
"In addition to the regular altimeter, Lieutenant Evans has a radar
altimeter, which works on the principle of the echo sounding machine
used by ships. A radar wave is transmitted from the small instrument to
the surface of the sea and bounces back again. The time elapsed between
transmission and reception is computed by the gadget in feet, giving an
accurate height reading. The information is passed back to the pilots
who adjust their pressure altimeters. In some cases the error of the
pressure altimeter measures up to three or four hundred feet in a
hurricane.
"The second leg of the box started at 3:05 P.M. and was quite short,
lasting only thirty minutes before the plane had run through the low
pressure and then to a place where it was six millibars higher. Low gray
ragged clouds increased in this sector and the ceiling lowered. On order
from the commander, called Sooky by the crew, the plane went down to two
hundred feet. Below, seen through a film of cloud, the water raged and
boiled. Huge streaks, many of them hundreds of feet long, etched white
lines on the beaten water, which was flatter than a pancake. The
roaring, tearing wind scooped up tons of water at a time which, as it
rose, was knocked flat again by the force of the wind. Sometimes the
wind would literally dig into the water, scooping it out. From this,
huge shell-shaped waves of spume would careen across the water."
At this point, someone yelled, "Sooky, take a look at the water. You'll
never see this again. Wind is ninety miles an hour now." All the crew
peered through the windows. The sea was absolutely flat, except for huge
streaks, some of which the weather observer estimated to be at least
five feet below the surface of the water. The time was 3:45 P.M.,
according to Fielding, who kept precise notes on everything. Instead of
being thrown all over the place as he had expected, the plane was being
lifted up and flopped down again in a series of sickening jolts. To
stand upright called for an acrobat, not a newspaperman. He found it
useless to stand, anyway. It resulted only in a hard crack on the head
when the plane dropped.
At 3:55 P.M., the navigator screeched over the interphone: "It's up to
one hundred miles an hour, now. Gee, is this some storm!" The rain came
in torrents. "Driven by a smashing, battering wind, it hammered on the
skin of the plane. The wind joined in the noise, howling and screeching
outside and the roar of the engines was drowned out by the mad symphony
of nature," wrote Fielding. The plane bucked and yawed but it was
designed for high-altitude flying, with pressurized cabins for use when
needed, and no rain came in.
They were on the third leg now and it became hotter in the plane.
Everybody was sweating profusely. Fielding wrote that the "storm bucked
and tossed the heavy bomber through the skies like a leaf in autumn." At
3:58 P.M., the wind was up to 120 knots. In the midst of all the noise,
Fielding heard a voice on the inter-com. "How are you feeling?" came a
question. "Not so good," was the miserable reply. "I wish Sooky would
get the plane out of this. That blue cheese I ate in a sandwich for
lunch is turning over. All I can taste is that stinking stuff." Others
admitted having fluttering stomachs.
The radar operator was unable to get the eye of the hurricane on the
scope. The co-pilot, Captain Hoffman, commented on the scene: "This is a
big storm. It has really picked up in size." Hardly were the words out
of his mouth before he yelled, "Hey, look, it's clear outside! The sun's
coming through." A shaft of sunlight probed through the clouds and
filled the cabin with a reassuring glow. They ran the fourth leg but
there was nothing new. Fielding thought that they had seen all that this
hurricane could produce in the way of violence. The radio operator got
Kindley Air Base on the 42-20 frequency and learned that all other
military planes in the area were warned to head for the nearest mainland
base. They asked for clearance to MacDill Field and got it at 6:25 P.M.
Stars appeared in a clearing sky and the plane leveled off and roared
through the darkness. It was good to be able to hear the engines again.
Tins of soup were opened and legs were stretched. Stomachs had settled
and there was light chatter over the inter-com. The plane touched down
at MacDill at 10:45 P.M. The men went to bed with aching bodies but they
slept. As Fielding said at the end of his notes, "We had been eleven
hours in the air, much of it in violent weather, and the constant strain
tells on you."
Finally, in 1954, the so-called "hairy hop" was projected into the
living rooms of people all over the country. When Hurricane Edna was
headed up the coast toward New England, Edward R. Murrow and a camera
crew of the Columbia Broadcasting System flew to Bermuda, and the Air
Force succeeded in getting the entire group--Murrow, three assistants
and one thousand five hundred pounds of camera equipment--in the front
of the plane. While everybody on the crew held his breath and Murrow
used up all the matches aboard and wore out the flint on a lighter, the
big plane was skillfully piloted through the squall bands and pushed
over into the center. The cameras ground away and Murrow asked endless
questions. The eye was magnificent, called a storybook setup, clear blue
skies above, the center being twenty miles in diameter, with cloud walls
rising to about 30,000 feet on all sides. The return was as skillful as
the entrance, through the squall bands, out from under the storm clouds
and back home above blue waters and in the sunshine. The film brought to
television viewers some idea of the majesty and power of a great storm.
Murrow described their passage into the eye of the storm in these words:
"The navigator (Captain Ed Vrable) asked for a turn to the left, and in
a couple of minutes the B-29 began to shudder. The co-pilot said: 'I
think we're in it.' The pilot said: 'We're going up,' although every
control was set to take us down. Something lifted us about three hundred
feet, then the pilot said: 'We're going down,' although he was doing
everything humanly possible to take us up. Edna was in control of the
aircraft. We were on an even keel but being staggered by short sharp
blows.
"Then we hit something with a bang that was audible above the roar of
the motors; a solid sheet of water. Seconds later brilliant sunshine hit
us like a hammer; someone shouted: 'There she is,' and we were in the
eye. Calm air, calm, flat sea below; a great amphitheater, round as a
dollar, with white clouds sloping up to twenty-five thousand or thirty
thousand feet. The water looked like a blue Alpine lake with snow-clad
mountains coming right down to the water's edge. A great bowl of
sunshine.
"The eye of a hurricane is an excellent place to reflect upon the
puniness of man and his works. If an adequate definition of humility is
ever written, it's likely to be done in the eye of a hurricane."
The Air Force man who made the arrangements for this broadcast, Major
William C. Anderson, said that this relatively smooth flight was the
best possible testimonial to the progress the hurricane hunters had made
in flying these big storms, for Edna was no weakling. But he worried
about it day and night until the flight was finished, for many strange
things can happen. When Murrow and his crew were safely back in New
York, Anderson turned in for his first good night's rest in two weeks,
duly thankful that it hadn't turned out to be a "hairy hop."
_14._ THE UNEXPECTED
"_There is not sufficient room for two airplanes in the eye of the
same hurricane._"
--Report to Joint Chiefs of Staff
Twenty-five years before men began flying into hurricanes, it was the
main purpose of the aviator to keep out of storms of all kinds. If he
ventured any distance out over the ocean in a "heavier-than-air"
machine, he expected to see ships guarding the route, to pick him up if
he fell in the water. In 1919, when the Navy had planes ready to fly
across the Atlantic, they had a "fleet" of ten destroyers and five
battleships stationed along the line of flight from Trepassey Bay,
Newfoundland, to Portugal via the Azores, to furnish weather reports
that would help the pilot to avoid headwinds, stormy weather and rough
seas, and to take part in rescue operations in case of accident.
Three airplanes, the NC-1, 3 and 4, used in this flight were designed
and built through the joint efforts of the Navy and the Curtiss
Aeroplane Company. These four-engined seaplanes, the largest built up to
that time, exceeded the present-day Douglas DC-3 airplane in size and
weight. Although sufficient fuel could be carried for a sixteen-hour
flight, cruising airspeed was but eighty miles an hour. During the
winter months of 1918 to 1919, plans were made by the Navy, in
co-operation with the Weather Bureau, for securing as complete and
widely distributed weather reports as possible for the Atlantic area
immediately prior to and during the flight. Through international
co-operation, observations were available from Iceland, Western Europe,
Canada, and Bermuda.