About nine hours after they had left Miami, they landed at the Naval Air Station, Corpus Christi, Texas. An hour later they were out of their dripping flight suits and “testing the quality of Texas draught beer.”
At dawn the next morning, another crew and another plane from the squadron was into the hurricane, only a few hours before it struck Tampico and then swirled inland, to dissipate itself on the mountain range to the west of that coastal city.
Shortly before the middle of September, 1948, the Weather Bureau in Washington had a long-distance call from the Baltimore Sun. A staff correspondent, Geoffrey W. Fielding, wanted to fly into a hurricane. The Weather Bureau arranged it through General Don Yates, in charge of the Air Weather Service, and on September 20, Fielding was authorized and invited to proceed to Bermuda at such time as necessary between that date and November 30, to go with one of the crews on a reconnaissance mission. The Air Force offered transportation to Bermuda and return at the proper time.
On the day of Fielding’s call, a vicious hurricane was threatening Bermuda and the B-29’s were exploring it, but it was too late to arrange a trip. On the thirteenth it passed a short distance east of the islands, with winds of 140 miles an hour. The next tropical disturbance was found in the Caribbean west of Jamaica and became a fully developed storm on September 19. As it raked its way across the western end of Cuba on the twentieth, and southern Florida on the twenty-first and twenty-second, Fielding flew to Bermuda. By the time they were ready to take off, the storm was picking up force after crossing Florida and was headed in his direction.
Not the worrying type, Fielding made notes of everything: the ditching tactics, the lifesavers and parachutes, sandwiches for lunch, the weather instruments, and the exact time of take-off, 12:03 P.M., Bermuda time. Already, high, thin cirrus clouds were seen, spreading ahead of the storm. Southward, the clouds lowered and thickened. And then the aircraft commander, Captain Frank Thompson, saw a tanker wallowing in the heavy swells a quarter of a mile below, and everybody had a look. Big seas swept over the bows of the ship and crashed on deck. The crew of the B-29 felt sorry for the men on the tanker.
“Watch that old ship roll down there,” said the pilot. “Those poor guys may be in this a couple days. They make very little headway as the hurricane drives toward them. I wouldn’t like to be in their place.” The super fortress flew a straight course into the teeth of the hurricane and low, ragged, rain-filled clouds soon hid the tanker from view. Increasing winds buffeted the big aircraft, which now seemed like a pigmy plane in this vast wind system. They were instructed to follow the “boxing” procedure and were headed for sixty-knot winds in the northeast sector.
Over the inter-communications suddenly came the excited voice of the navigator, Lieutenant Chester Camp: “I’ve got them—there they are—sixty-knot winds. Bring the plane around.” The plane banked in a right turn as the pilot brought the winds on the tail and shot fuel into the engines to force the plane through winds that would become more violent. So they started the first leg of the box.
The weather officer, Lieutenant Chester Evans, was seated in the bomb-aimer’s position in the glass nose of the plane, practically in the teeth of the gale. In addition to keeping track of the weather, he guided the pilots by reading the altimeters to get the height of the plane above the sea. In spite of the jostling he was getting from the bouncing plane, Fielding investigated these operations and wrote in his notebook:
“In addition to the regular altimeter, Lieutenant Evans has a radar altimeter, which works on the principle of the echo sounding machine used by ships. A radar wave is transmitted from the small instrument to the surface of the sea and bounces back again. The time elapsed between transmission and reception is computed by the gadget in feet, giving an accurate height reading. The information is passed back to the pilots who adjust their pressure altimeters. In some cases the error of the pressure altimeter measures up to three or four hundred feet in a hurricane.
“The second leg of the box started at 3:05 P.M. and was quite short, lasting only thirty minutes before the plane had run through the low pressure and then to a place where it was six millibars higher. Low gray ragged clouds increased in this sector and the ceiling lowered. On order from the commander, called Sooky by the crew, the plane went down to two hundred feet. Below, seen through a film of cloud, the water raged and boiled. Huge streaks, many of them hundreds of feet long, etched white lines on the beaten water, which was flatter than a pancake. The roaring, tearing wind scooped up tons of water at a time which, as it rose, was knocked flat again by the force of the wind. Sometimes the wind would literally dig into the water, scooping it out. From this, huge shell-shaped waves of spume would careen across the water.”