And so it is easy to think of a plane in a hurricane as being like an oak leaf in a thunderstorm, except that the leaf is bigger in proportion but lacks the skillful handling of a youthful crew, alert, fearful and resourceful, straining desperately to keep it from rocketing steeply into the wind-torn sea below. For these reasons, the men who ventured in 1943 to probe tropical storms by air were exceedingly cautious about it. They went into it at a high level—usually as far up as the plane would go—and came down by easy stages, in the calm center, if possible, ready to turn around and dash for land the moment anything went wrong.
The next after Duckworth and his associates to look into a hurricane was Captain G. H. MacDougall of the Army Air Forces. The second fully-developed storm of 1943 came from far out in the open Atlantic and passed east of the Windward Islands on a north-northwest course toward Bermuda. MacDougall wanted to have a first-hand view of its insides. Ships in the Atlantic were reporting extremely high winds and waves fifty to sixty feet high and five hundred to six hundred feet in length. MacDougall went to see Colonel Alan, who said he was ready to pilot the plane. So the two took off from Antigua on August 20.
According to the report by MacDougall, they came in at a very high level and began to explore the outer circulation of the storm. He said: “We ran into rain falling from overcast. There were broken cumulus and stratus clouds below us. As the sun became more and more blotted out, we seemed to be heading into a bluish twilight. In spite of the low visibility due both to rain and moderate haze, it was impossible to make out the ocean through the wind-torn stratus below, and while we were yet to see the teeth of the storm, the snarl was already too evident. A surface wind of forty to fifty miles per hour from the southwest was probably a good estimate in this part of the storm. Colonel Alan now began to let the plane down and we stopped taking oxygen. At the same time, the wheels were let down to minimize the turbulence, and the plane leveled off at an elevation of one thousand feet which was below the stratus.
“For those of us who had spent enough time in the Caribbean to be familiar with the magnitude of the waves usually encountered, it was hard to believe what we saw below. The seas were tremendous and the crests were being blown off in long swirls by a wind that must easily have exceeded seventy miles per hour. The long parallel streaks of foam streaming from one wave to another made it evident from which direction the wind was blowing.”
About a month later, a tropical storm formed in the western Gulf of Mexico, not far from Vera Cruz. Shortly afterward, it moved toward the Texas coast, increasing rapidly in force, and there was general alarm. People began to abandon the beaches and protect their property in the coastal towns. At this time there was a young officer, Lieutenant Paul Ekern, at Tinker Air Field near Oklahoma City, who was anxious to see the inside of one of these big storms. This one looked like his last chance for 1943 and he began talking it up. He found Sergeant Jack Huennekens who was ready to go and they looked for a plane and pilot. Time went by, but the hurricane center slowed down to a crawl and described a loop off the coast, taking three days to turn around. Excited conversations about the storm created interest, and about the time that Ekern and Huennekens found an Air Force pilot, Captain Griffin, anxious to go, a Navy man came over from Norman, Oklahoma, and said he had some instruments he would like to carry into the hurricane and get records of conditions encountered. He was told that anybody crazy enough to go was welcome. He introduced himself as a Navy Aerologist, Gerald Finger, and they all shook hands and got their things ready.
On the afternoon of the eighteenth, with the hurricane still hanging ominously off the coast but with some loss of violence, the crew took off for south Texas, carrying the Navy man and his instruments. They came into the storm area at about thirty thousand feet and proceeded cautiously toward the center. At this level there was very little turbulence, but the view was magnificent. There were mountainous thunderclouds, some extending fifteen thousand feet above the plane. Carefully they explored the region and finally came into a place where they could see the surface of the Gulf white with foam and piled-up clouds ringing a space where the sky was partly clear. This, they decided, must be the center.
Cautiously they went down to twelve thousand feet, circling around as they descended, and keeping records of temperature, humidity, and pressure. At times they flew through clouds on instruments in the rain, and now and then there was light icing. After about three hours, they began to run low on gas, so they flew through the western part of the storm and back to Oklahoma.
At the end of the hurricane season, these flights were reported to the Weather Bureau and recommendations were forwarded to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that military aircraft be used routinely to explore hurricanes and improve the accuracy of the warnings. The Joint Chiefs referred this to their meteorological committee, with representatives of the Army Air Corps, the Navy and the Weather Bureau, and on February 15, 1944, a plan was approved for the coming season. As far as possible, crews with experience in flying the weather were selected. Some of these had been on daily missions on the Atlantic, for the protection of convoys. By the beginning of the 1944 season, planes and men were at their posts in Florida, ready to go on instructions from the joint hurricane center in Miami.
Probing of hurricanes by air came to a sharp focus in September, 1944. On the eighth, signs of a disturbance were picked up in the Atlantic, northeast of Puerto Rico. As it approached the northern Bahamas, its central pressure was extremely low, below 27.00 inches—estimated at 26.85—and it covered an enormous area with winds of terrific force. From here its center crossed the extreme eastern tip of North Carolina, sideswiped the New Jersey coast, doing vast damage, and then hit Long Island and New England with tremendous fury. On account of the war, ships at sea were not reporting the weather and the hurricane hunters had a real job on their hands.
On the morning of the tenth, Forecaster Norton at the Miami Weather Bureau studied the weather map, grumbled about the lack of observations from the West Indies, and decided to ask for a plane to go out and report the weather north of Puerto Rico. He had little to go on, but he thought it was a very bad storm. On the afternoon of the ninth, the Air Corps had sent a plane out from Antigua. They had reported winds of eighty miles, very rough seas, and center about 250 miles northeast of San Juan. Very little information had come from the area since that time, except the regular weather messages from San Juan. After trying to get the Navy office on the telephone half a dozen times, Norton gave up. Every time he started to dial, the phone rang and he answered it, making an effort to hang up quickly and get a call in before it rang again. But many people had learned about the storm and were anxious for more information, hence the phone was constantly busy.