While no planes were lost in probing this terrible storm, a destroyer, a mine sweeper, two Coast Guard cutters, and a light vessel were sunk. An Army plane estimated the winds at 140 miles an hour. The weather officer, Lieutenant Victor Klobucher, said that it was the worst storm that had been probed by the hurricane hunters up to that time. The turbulence was so bad that, with both the pilot and co-pilot straining every muscle, the plane could not be kept under control, and several times they thought it would be torn apart or crash into the sea. On returning to the base, the fliers found that 150 rivets had been sheared off one wing alone.
On the morning of the fourteenth of September, the terrible tempest was close to the eastern tip of North Carolina, apparently destined to sideswipe the coast from there northward with devastating force. There was some alarm in Washington. It might possibly turn more to the northward and its center might come up Chesapeake Bay or up the Potomac River. A violent storm in Washington at that time would have been detrimental to the prosecution of war plans. In 1933, a smaller hurricane had taken this course and its destructive visit to the Bay region and the Capital had not been forgotten. Also, in the minds of the military was the opportunity offered that day to explore a big hurricane and find out more concerning its inner workings.
On that critical morning, Colonel F. B. Wood, a veteran flyer in the Air Corps, came down to Bolling Field outside Washington with hurricane-probing on his mind. After talking about it to the men around the field, he decided to try a flight at least into the outer edges of the storm as it passed to the eastward during the day. He thought about the junior officers and men being sent into these furious winds and he felt it was a good idea for one of the head men to go out and see what it was like.
Wood talked to Lieutenant Frank Record and found he was anxious to go. He grabbed the telephone and got Major Harry Wexler on the line. Harry was a Weather Bureau research official who was in the Army for the duration.
“Harry, how about taking you out in the hurricane today?” Wood asked. “I’ll pilot the plane. Frank is going along.”
“Sure you can take me out, but you’ve got to bring me back,” Harry answered. “This is a round trip, Floyd, I hope.” Wood agreed to do his best to make a round trip out of it.
At two o’clock that afternoon, the trio took off and headed east with some misgivings. They knew that this was one of the worst tropical storms that had been charted up to that time. The hurricane was then centered near Cape Henry, Virginia. The wind at Norfolk had been up to ninety miles an hour. Colonel Wood described it as follows:
“Immediately after take-off, we penetrated a thin overcast, the top of which was about fifteen hundred feet, and then proceeded to a point approximately twenty miles northeast of Langley Field. The boundary of the hurricane, as seen from the latter location, was a dense black wall running along the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay. The airplane was turned on a heading so as to fly a track that would lead straight toward the estimated position of the center of the hurricane. Altitude was three thousand feet. A drift correction of 30° was allowed to account for the estimated one hundred miles per hour cross wind encountered at the outer edge of the storm. Immediately on entering the outer edge, the atmosphere turned very dark and a blanket of heavy rainfall was encountered.”
Very surprisingly, the flyers reported that in this area a strong but steady down-current was also encountered. The latter was contrary to the accepted idea that all of the area encompassed by the steep pressure fall in a hurricane contains ascending rather than descending air up to great heights. Although visibility was very low, due to the heavy rainfall, there were very few clouds below the altitude of the airplane (three thousand feet), except for some scud over Cape Henry.
The waves in Chesapeake Bay were enormous. A freighter plowing through the Bay was being swept from bow to stern by huge waves which at times appeared to engulf the whole vessel at once. Spray was being thrown into the air at heights which appeared to reach two hundred feet above the surface of the Bay. From the appearance of the water, both within Chesapeake Bay and east of Cape Henry, it is not surprising that a Navy destroyer of the 1850-ton class was sunk there. One of the foremost thoughts in the men’s minds at the time was that should the aircraft be forced down in the hurricane, neither life rafts, “Mae Wests,” or any other lifesaving device would have saved them from drowning!