“Whirlwinds are most violent near their centers.” —Euripides
After war broke out in Europe in 1939, the job of finding and predicting hurricanes became steadily more difficult. Ships of countries at war ceased to report weather by radio and fewer vessels of neutral nations dared to risk submarine attack. After Pearl Harbor, the American merchant marine also stopped their weather messages and the oceans were blanked out on the weather maps. Already the British had been confronted by the lack of weather reports from the Atlantic and the seas around the British Isles, and this was extremely serious in their fight against Nazi air power.
Notwithstanding the alarming scarcity of planes for military purposes, the British were forced to send aircraft on routine weather missions. They usually flew a track in the shape of a triangle—for example, one leg of the triangle northwestward until well out at sea, a second leg southward across the ocean about an equal distance, and the last leg back to home base. Other triangles were flown over Europe and back and over the North Sea. As time went on, the pilots of these observation planes gained much experience in flying the weather, including some fairly bad storms, but no one had occasion to fly into a hurricane. There was a good deal of talk about the situation in the United States in 1942, however, because of the danger that the West Indian region might become a theater of war, if the Nazi armies gained control of West Africa and attacked the United States by air, across Brazil and the Caribbean.
With this threat from the southeast, the United States took action, which was a repetition of the events during the Spanish War in 1898. Military weather stations were set up in the West Indies and aircraft were prepared to fly weather missions in the area. At the same time, the United States was getting ready to ferry planes across the South Atlantic via the Caribbean, the South American Coast and Ascension Island. It was very definitely evident early in 1942 that hurricanes might play a critical role if the West Indies became a theater of war. By 1943, however, there were two surprising turns of affairs. The Allies invaded Africa late in 1942 and the first flight into a hurricane center, unscheduled and unauthorized, came in 1943.
The first to fly into the vortex of a hurricane was Joseph B. Duckworth, a veteran pilot of the scheduled airlines, who was at the time a colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserve, in command of the Instrument Flying Instructors School at Bryan, Texas. It was one of those rare combinations of circumstances by which the man with the necessary skill, experience, daring, and inclination happened to be at the right place at the right time. With a full appreciation of the danger, he flew a single engine airplane deliberately into the hurricane and proceeded on a direct heading into the calm center, looked around, and flew back to Bryan. Spotting his weather officer, he bundled him into the back seat and duplicated the feat immediately!
Joe Duckworth was born in Savannah, Georgia, on September 8, 1902, which, incidentally, was the anniversary date of the terrible Galveston disaster of 1900, and it was a hurricane at Galveston into which he flew in 1943. Joe’s mother was Mary Haines, a Savannah girl. His father, Hubert Duckworth, was a naturalized Englishman who had been sent to the States to take over the American cotton offices of Joe’s grandfather, after whom he was named. When Joe was two years of age, the family moved to Macon, Georgia, where his father was vice-president of the Bibb Manufacturing Company.
Joe’s first memory of anything connected with aviation was when his parents took him to the fair grounds at Macon to see Eugene Ely fly in an early Wright-type biplane. The wind was not right for a flight. Pilots were cautious in those days and Ely didn’t go up. Joe and his parents were looking at the plane when his father remarked, “You know, some day they will be carrying passengers in these things.” His mother answered, “Don’t be silly, Hubert, you might as well try to fly to the moon.” Joe had a vague idea at the time that he would like to fly when he grew up. Long afterward, he did. He says, “Many times in the nineteen thirties I captained an Eastern Airlines plane over Macon and looked down on the old fair grounds and recalled the thrill I had on seeing my first airplane and the remarks of my mother and father.”
After his father died in 1914, Joe attended Woodberry Forest School in Orange, Virginia, for three years and then went for two years to Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, graduating from there in 1920. In the meantime, his mother had moved to Atlanta and he continued his education for two years at Georgia Tech, and one year at Oglethorpe University. Nothing he did would take flying out of his mind and he finally gained admission to the Flying Cadets. After going through both Brooks and Kelly Fields as Cadet Captain, he was graduated in 1928, the happiest year of his life. Later, while flying for Eastern Airlines, he got a law degree from the University of Miami.
With basic training of the kind that young Duckworth received as a Cadet, he was not fitted to fly into a hurricane or into any sort of really bad weather. Military operations at that time were strictly visual or “contact.” The problem was not how to get through bad weather—thunderstorms, low overcast, fog, for example—but how to keep out of it. There were few flight instruments, and there was no instrument flying training. At that time, dirigibles were thought by many leaders in aeronautics to have the best passenger-carrying possibilities for the future. Steel had just replaced wood in fuselages and airplanes in general had earned the description “heavier-than air.” On the other hand, the world had been electrified by Lindbergh’s flight to Paris in 1927 and other “stunt” flights became numerous. Another thrilling piece of news was Admiral Byrd’s flight to the South Pole in 1929.
Trial freight-carrying runs were being flown by the Ford Motor Company from Detroit to Chicago and from Detroit to Buffalo, and Joe heard that a young man could get tri-motor flight time as a co-pilot two days a week, provided he worked four days in the factory. Duckworth headed for Detroit. After getting on the job with Ford, he had his first serious run-in with clear ice, or freezing rain. The plane barely made South Bend Airport, coming in at high speed with a load of ice on the wings. Fifteen years later, the pilot on instruments would have climbed quickly into the warmer air at higher levels and then worked his way down to destination, but instrument flying was unknown at the time.