“As a result of this turbulence my feet came up off the rudder pedals. The engineer, who was sitting on the nose wheel door instructing a student engineer, came up off the floor like he was floating in the air. The navigator and weather observer were raised out of their seats. A coffee cup, which was on the back of the airplane commander’s instrument panel, was raised to the ceiling and came down on the weather observer’s table. Cabin airflow was being used and the airflow meter exploded and glass hit both engineers in the face.”
In December, 1948, a crew under the command of Lieutenant David Lykins was instructed to use the boxing procedure in a typhoon called “Beverly.” On one of their missions, they flew into it on December 7. The following is based on his report:
The operations office instructed the crew to climb to the seven hundred millibar level (about ten thousand feet) after take-off, penetrate the eye of the storm, take a fix in the center, then make a spiral descent and sounding down to one thousand five hundred feet and proceed out of the storm on a northwesterly heading, to begin the pattern around the storm center.
After the briefing, the crew ate dinner, while talking anxiously about the trip, and returned to the aircraft to load personal equipment. When they were airborne with the gear and flaps up, they made an initial contact with Guam Control. There was no reported traffic, so they were cleared. The instructions were complied with and a heading of 270 degrees was taken up. Soon there was discernible on the horizon a vast coverage of high, thin clouds at about thirty thousand feet. This indicated the presence of the storm, verified by the south wind and slight swells that were perpendicular to the flight direction of the plane. The wind was increasing and the swells were noticed to intensify. The boundary of the storm area was very distinct as they approached the edge. At this point, the surface wind was estimated to be thirty-five knots from 180 degrees.
A few minutes later they were on one hundred per cent instrument flying conditions and the moderate to heavy rain and moderate turbulence persisted until they missed the eye and flew south for fifteen minutes. Because they were on instruments and could not see the surface, they were unable to determine the highest wind velocity in the storm. It was estimated close to one hundred knots. At this point they noticed that they had a good drift correction for hitting the center satisfactorily, so they held the 270 degrees heading, relying on the radar observer to be able to see the eye on the scope.
Approximately fifteen or twenty minutes later, the radar observer reported seeing a semi-circular ring of clouds about twenty-five degrees to the right at about twenty-five miles range. The same kind of ring was detected to the left, about the same distance, however. Figuring they had drifted to the right of the center, they elected to intercept the left center seen on the radar and flew until they received an ill-omened pressure rise, when it was apparent they had made a wrong choice!
To make sure they were not chasing circular rings of heavy clouds or false eyes on the scope, they made a turn to 180 degrees and held it long enough to enable them to see the surface wind. After about ten minutes they saw the surface and judged the wind to be coming from approximately west-northwest. They headed back for the center of the storm with the wind off their left wing, allowing fifteen to twenty degrees for drift. In approximately fifteen minutes the radar observer reported the eye as being almost directly ahead. Lieutenant Lykins said:
“At 0906Z (1906 Guam time) we broke out into the most beautiful and well-defined eye that I have ever seen. It was a perfect circle about thirty miles in diameter and beautifully clear overhead. The sides sloped gently inward toward the bottom from twenty-five thousand feet and appeared to be formed by a solid cloud layer down to approximately five thousand feet. From one thousand feet to five thousand feet were tiers of circular cumulus clouds giving the effect of seats in a huge stadium.”
They descended in the eye, made their observations and then prepared to depart. Lieutenant Lykins continued:
“As we entered the edge of the eye we were shaken by turbulence so severe that it took both pilots to keep the airplane in an upright attitude. At times the updrafts and downdrafts were so severe that I was forced down in my seat so hard that I could not lift my head and I could not see the instruments. Other times I was thrown against my safety belt so hard that my arms and legs were of no use momentarily, and I was unable to exert pressure on the controls. All I could do was use the artificial horizon momentarily until I could see and interpret the rest of the instruments. These violent forces were not of long duration fortunately, for had they been it would have been physically impossible to control the airplane.