In the spring of 1929, Joe went with the Curtis Wright Flying Service as their first instructor, at Grosse Ile, near Detroit. They were starting out to set up a nation-wide chain of bases with the idea of teaching everyone to fly. The plan was successful at first and in the fall Joe opened a branch at Atlanta, just as the stock market broke wide open. The slump in business that followed in 1930 caused general failure in the flying services. In December, Joe saw that the Atlanta branch was going out of business, and he went to work as a pilot for Eastern Air Transport, now Eastern Airlines, and remained with the company for ten years. At first he flew mail planes with parachutes but no passengers.
Even then there was no such thing as flying the weather. On his first mail flight, he got some pointed advice from the operations manager. He told Joe to be “sure to be on the look out for a reflection of the revolving radio beacon on the cloud ceiling and the moment you see such an apparition, you must get down immediately in an emergency field. If you let the overcast close down on you, you are strictly out of luck.” Airplanes were a long way then from being equipped to fly into hurricanes.
What little was known at that time about the temperature, pressure, and humidity in the upper air was secured by kites sent up daily at a few places. They were box kites, carrying recording instruments and flown by steel piano wire. Observers let them rise and pulled them in by reels and, after examining the records, sent the data to the weather forecasters. This was a slow process and, besides, it was becoming dangerous around airports where the data were needed most. A long piano wire in the sky was a serious hazard for aircraft. After 1931 this method was abandoned, and pilots under contract to the Weather Bureau attached weather-recording instruments to their planes and ascended to a height of three miles or a little higher, and on return gave the records to the weather observer, who worked them up and wired the results to the forecasters. Army and Navy pilots carried out similar missions at military bases. This plan worked fairly well. The flights were made early in the morning but when the weather was bad and the data would have been most useful, the planes were obliged to remain on the ground.
Gradually, beginning about 1932, airline pilots began more and more intentional flights “on instruments,” that is, operating in clouds without visual reference to ground or horizon. Reliability of schedules was an economic necessity. Navigation by radio was becoming more of a commonplace and, by experiment and self-teaching, by 1940 airlines were flying almost all kinds of en route weather, including thunderstorms.
In 1940, Joe’s thoughts turned to the Army Air Corps, in which he held a reserve commission as Major. It looked as though war might come to the United States, so in November of that year he resigned from Eastern to enter active duty—probably the first airline pilot to do so. Assigned to the Training Command, he never got overseas—but what he did in teaching instrument flying throughout the Air Corps is still acknowledged and appreciated by thousands of wartime pilots. He received literally hundreds of letters expressing their gratitude, some of them declaring that the training they had received had literally saved their lives on many occasions.
Joe found a serious lack of instrument flight training in the Air Corps, due to the frenzied expansion of training for War. And, as Joe said, “You couldn’t call off the war when the weather was bad!” He set out to make his wartime mission the remedying of this situation, and the record will show he did a monumental job. Cutting “red tape” wherever possible, experimenting, lecturing, and writing a whole new system of instrument flying training, he and his chosen assistants culminated two years of intensive effort by establishing an instrument flying instructors school at Bryan, Texas, in February of 1943. During the next two years, the school provided over ten thousand highly qualified instructors to the Army Air Forces, and attained a solid reputation which is not forgotten today. Joe’s instructors flew all types of weather—anywhere—and at the same time piled up a safety record unheard of at the time. The manuals they developed are still, in principle, the standard of today’s Air Force.
Joe’s school taught, through novel and thorough techniques, two things. First, that there is no weather, except practically zero-zero landing conditions, that cannot be flown by the competent instrument pilot, with proper equipment. Second, that the safety and utility of both military and commercial flight depend almost wholly on the competence of the pilot in instrument flying.
Thus it came about that the first flight into a hurricane center was not the result of a sudden notion but of years of intensive training in flying the weather, including storms, and the flyer who did it was probably the most expert in the world at getting safely through all kinds of weather. Looking at it from this point of view, it is not strange that there was a rather amusing sequel to this story, involving the other instructors at Bryan, Texas. But first we come to the story of the history-making flight by Colonel Duckworth.
Early on the morning of July 27, 1943, Joe came out to have breakfast at the field. The sky at Bryan was absolutely clear and it did not seem to promise any kind of weather that would try the mettle of men whose business it was to fly in stormy conditions. Someone at the table said he had seen a report that a hurricane was approaching Galveston. Joe was immediately attentive. Sitting opposite him was a young and enthusiastic navigator, the only one at the field, Lieutenant Ralph O’Hair.
Thinking again about the fact that no one had flown a hurricane and that it ought to be easy because of the circular flow, Joe suggested to Ralph: “Let’s go down and get an AT-6 and penetrate the center, just for fun.” He said it would be “for fun” because he felt sure that higher headquarters probably would not approve the risk of the aircraft and highly trained personnel for an official flight. There were three or four newly arrived B-25’s at the field but Duckworth had not had the time to check out in one of them and therefore could not fly a B-25 (a twin-engine airplane) without going through some formalities. Use of the AT-6, of course, involved the danger that its one engine might quit inside the hurricane and they would be in trouble.