“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.”