Lieutenant O’Hair was quite willing—enthusiastic in fact—and the pair gathered such information as was available about the hurricane and made ready for the flight. They took off in the AT-6 shortly after noon. The data on the storm had been rather meagre. Two days before, Forecaster W. R. Stevens at New Orleans had deduced from the charts that a tropical storm was forming in the Gulf to the southward. He drew his conclusion almost solely from upper air data at coastal stations, for no ships were reporting from the Gulf. On the twenty-sixth, Stevens had correctly tracked it westward toward Galveston (quite a feat in view of the lack of observations) and warnings had been issued in advance.
On the morning of the twenty-seventh, this small but intense hurricane was moving inland on the Texas Coast, a short distance north of Galveston, and by early afternoon the winds were blowing eighty to one hundred miles an hour on Galveston Bay and in Chambers County, to the eastward of the Bay. Houston and Galveston were in the western or less dangerous semicircle, a favorable condition for the flight from Bryan to Houston. Soon after leaving Bryan, the venturesome airmen were in the clouds on the outer rim of the storm—with scud and choppy air—and shortly after they ran into rain. Precipitation static began to give them trouble in communications but there was no other serious difficulty.
As they approached Houston, the air smoothed out, the static leaked off the plane, the radio was quiet, and the overcast grew darker. They called Houston. The airways radio operator was surprised when they said their destination was Galveston.
“Do you know there is a hurricane at Galveston?” the operator asked.
“Yes, we do,” said O’Hair. “We intend to fly into the thing.”
“Well, please report back every little while,” the operator requested. “Let me know what happens.” Evidently, he wanted to be able to say what became of the plane if they went down in the storm.
At this point Joe’s mind began to run back over some of the lectures the flight instructor had given and recall how they had stressed the fact that a pilot should always have an “out,” even if it meant taking to a parachute. He wondered what it would be like to use a parachute in a hurricane. They were flying at a height of four thousand to nine thousand feet.
As they approached the center, the air became choppier again and he said afterward that they were “being tossed about like a stick in a dog’s mouth,” without much chance of getting away from the grip of the storm. Checking on the radio ranges at Houston and Galveston, they flew over the latter and then turned northward. Suddenly, they broke out of the dark overcast and rain and entered brighter clouds. Almost immediately, they could see high walls of white cumulus all around the circular area in the center and, below them, the ground and above the sky quite clearly. The plane was in the calm center. The ground below was not surely identified but it seemed to be open country, somewhere between Galveston and Houston. They descended in an effort to get their position more clearly but the air became rougher as their altitude decreased. This led Duckworth to the conclusion that the eye of the hurricane was like a “leaning cone,” the lower part probably being restricted and retarded by the frictional drag of the land over which the storm was passing. They flew around in the center a while and then took a compass course for Bryan.
Once out of the center, the plane went through, in reverse, the conditions the fliers had experienced on the way in, arriving at the air field at Bryan in clear weather. When they got out of the plane, the weather officer, Lieutenant William Jones-Burdick, came up and said he was very disappointed that he had not made this important flight.
Duckworth said, “OK, hop in and we’ll go back through and have another look.” So he and the weather officer flew into the calm center again and looked around a while. The weather officer kept a log from which the following excerpts are taken, beginning with their entry into dense clouds on the way into the hurricane. The time given here is twenty-four-hour clock. Subtract 1200 to get time (P.M.) by Central Standard.