“‘I may be wrong,’ he says, ‘but it looks to me as if it’s made a little curve toward the north.’
“Which is very interesting—but more interesting is the fact that the day’s work is over and we’re on our way home.”
In 1947, the Air Forces were assigning B-29’s to their Kindley Base at Bermuda, to replace the B-17’s. The big superforts had room for guests and it soon became common to have somebody hanging around Kindley to get a ride. When a big storm was spotted east of the Windward Islands on the eleventh of September of that year, two newspaper reporters and a photographer from Life Magazine, Francis Miller, were waiting at Bermuda for a hop. The big hurricane became even more violent as it turned toward the southwest and swept across Florida. It was September 14th when Milt Sosin of the Miami Daily News got his “hairy hop” in this same blow. As it crossed the coast, winds of full hurricane force stretched over a distance of 240 miles and the wind reached 155 miles an hour at Hillsboro Light. By this time the hurricane hunters were fully occupied and the riders were left on the ground. Miami communication lines were wiped out and control of the hunters had been shifted to Washington. In charge of a B-17 at Bermuda was Major Hawley. His co-pilot was Captain Dunn, who had learned hurricane hunting in “Kappler’s Hurricane” and other earlier storms. Late on the seventeenth, as the storm roared across Florida with night closing in, Hawley had heard nothing from Washington about his plane going into it, so he gave up and told the riders to come back in the morning.
Early the next morning, one of the reporters, a staff writer for the Bermuda Royal Gazette, was sitting around in his shorts and thinking about breakfast when Lieutenant Cronin rushed in and said they were ready to take off. The reporter started to get dressed, but Cronin said, “Let’s go. Just as you are. You may drown but you won’t freeze.” They stopped in Hamilton, got the other reporter and the photographer, and found Hawley walking up and down, impatiently waiting for last instructions. So the reporter took a trip of 3,350 miles in his shorts and had a bird’s-eye view of the southern Seaboard, the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico and a bad-acting hurricane.
It was a “hairy hop.” They had orders to refuel at Mobile, so they put down at the airfield there, all other planes having been evacuated the day before. An Air Force man came out and asked, “Where you goin’?” They told him and he turned around and shouted, “Some dang fools think they have a kite and can fly through a hurricane.” More men came out and they got gas in the plane. One big fellow said, “You can have your dern trip. But keep the storm away from here.” In twenty minutes they were in the storm. The crew members were bare to the waist, perspiration pouring down, water coming through the panel joints, and everything was wet and shaking. One of the reporters described it this way:
“Suddenly the plane keeled over on one side, the left wing tip dipped down vertically, and for a moment I thought the end had come. I gulped for breath as the plane dropped. The sea rushed up towards us; huge waves reared up and mocked us, clawing up at the wing tip as if trying to swallow us in one. A greater burst from the engines, a hovering sensation for a second and then, with the whole plane shuddering under the strain, our nose once again tilted upward. I felt weak and with difficulty breathed again.”
The plane had no radar and the crew had a lot of trouble trying to locate the center of the hurricane. The forecasters at Miami were anxious for an accurate position of the center. At that time airborne radars were being installed as standard equipment as rapidly as they could get around to it but the B-17’s came last. Low pressure guided them, and they were trying to get into the part of the hurricane where they found the pressure falling rapidly. It was a big storm and they were having little luck in the search. “Lashed by winds and rain, the B-17 staggered across the sky,” one of the reporters said afterward. He went on to tell his story:
“I was growing sick in the bomb aimer’s bay stretched over a pile of parachutes and hanging onto the navigator’s chair for dear life. Some baggage, roped down beforehand, now lay strewn across the gangway. Parachutes, life jackets, water cans and camera cases were thrown about into heaps. The photographer, trying in vain to take pictures out of the window, was knocked down and sent flying across the fuselage. His arms were bruised from repeated efforts. My stomach was everywhere but where it should have been. Everything went black. The plane was thrown from side to side and the floor under my feet dropped. We emerged from a big cloud into an eerie and uncanny pink half-light. The photographer clambered from the floor and tried to look out. He thought the reddish light was an engine on fire.
“Before we touched down at Tampa, after four hours of flying around in the hurricane, we reporters and the photographer were exhausted. And even then they had failed to get into the calm center, although they had sent back to Washington a lot of useful information on the storm’s position.”
More than anything else, the preliminaries unnerve the guest rider. They tell him about the “ditching” procedures; that is, what to do if the plane is on the verge of settling down on the raging sea. Two or three hours before take-off they are likely to have a ditching drill, along with the briefing on the storm and the check on the equipment. The guest is told that if they bail out, he will go through a forward bomb bay door. There is hollow laughter as someone makes it clear that there is very little chance of survival. But they want the guest to have every advantage.