At this point, someone yelled, “Sooky, take a look at the water. You’ll never see this again. Wind is ninety miles an hour now.” All the crew peered through the windows. The sea was absolutely flat, except for huge streaks, some of which the weather observer estimated to be at least five feet below the surface of the water. The time was 3:45 P.M., according to Fielding, who kept precise notes on everything. Instead of being thrown all over the place as he had expected, the plane was being lifted up and flopped down again in a series of sickening jolts. To stand upright called for an acrobat, not a newspaperman. He found it useless to stand, anyway. It resulted only in a hard crack on the head when the plane dropped.
At 3:55 P.M., the navigator screeched over the interphone: “It’s up to one hundred miles an hour, now. Gee, is this some storm!” The rain came in torrents. “Driven by a smashing, battering wind, it hammered on the skin of the plane. The wind joined in the noise, howling and screeching outside and the roar of the engines was drowned out by the mad symphony of nature,” wrote Fielding. The plane bucked and yawed but it was designed for high-altitude flying, with pressurized cabins for use when needed, and no rain came in.
They were on the third leg now and it became hotter in the plane. Everybody was sweating profusely. Fielding wrote that the “storm bucked and tossed the heavy bomber through the skies like a leaf in autumn.” At 3:58 P.M., the wind was up to 120 knots. In the midst of all the noise, Fielding heard a voice on the inter-com. “How are you feeling?” came a question. “Not so good,” was the miserable reply. “I wish Sooky would get the plane out of this. That blue cheese I ate in a sandwich for lunch is turning over. All I can taste is that stinking stuff.” Others admitted having fluttering stomachs.
The radar operator was unable to get the eye of the hurricane on the scope. The co-pilot, Captain Hoffman, commented on the scene: “This is a big storm. It has really picked up in size.” Hardly were the words out of his mouth before he yelled, “Hey, look, it’s clear outside! The sun’s coming through.” A shaft of sunlight probed through the clouds and filled the cabin with a reassuring glow. They ran the fourth leg but there was nothing new. Fielding thought that they had seen all that this hurricane could produce in the way of violence. The radio operator got Kindley Air Base on the 42-20 frequency and learned that all other military planes in the area were warned to head for the nearest mainland base. They asked for clearance to MacDill Field and got it at 6:25 P.M. Stars appeared in a clearing sky and the plane leveled off and roared through the darkness. It was good to be able to hear the engines again. Tins of soup were opened and legs were stretched. Stomachs had settled and there was light chatter over the inter-com. The plane touched down at MacDill at 10:45 P.M. The men went to bed with aching bodies but they slept. As Fielding said at the end of his notes, “We had been eleven hours in the air, much of it in violent weather, and the constant strain tells on you.”
Finally, in 1954, the so-called “hairy hop” was projected into the living rooms of people all over the country. When Hurricane Edna was headed up the coast toward New England, Edward R. Murrow and a camera crew of the Columbia Broadcasting System flew to Bermuda, and the Air Force succeeded in getting the entire group—Murrow, three assistants and one thousand five hundred pounds of camera equipment—in the front of the plane. While everybody on the crew held his breath and Murrow used up all the matches aboard and wore out the flint on a lighter, the big plane was skillfully piloted through the squall bands and pushed over into the center. The cameras ground away and Murrow asked endless questions. The eye was magnificent, called a storybook setup, clear blue skies above, the center being twenty miles in diameter, with cloud walls rising to about 30,000 feet on all sides. The return was as skillful as the entrance, through the squall bands, out from under the storm clouds and back home above blue waters and in the sunshine. The film brought to television viewers some idea of the majesty and power of a great storm.
Murrow described their passage into the eye of the storm in these words:
“The navigator (Captain Ed Vrable) asked for a turn to the left, and in a couple of minutes the B-29 began to shudder. The co-pilot said: ‘I think we’re in it.’ The pilot said: ‘We’re going up,’ although every control was set to take us down. Something lifted us about three hundred feet, then the pilot said: ‘We’re going down,’ although he was doing everything humanly possible to take us up. Edna was in control of the aircraft. We were on an even keel but being staggered by short sharp blows.
“Then we hit something with a bang that was audible above the roar of the motors; a solid sheet of water. Seconds later brilliant sunshine hit us like a hammer; someone shouted: ‘There she is,’ and we were in the eye. Calm air, calm, flat sea below; a great amphitheater, round as a dollar, with white clouds sloping up to twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand feet. The water looked like a blue Alpine lake with snow-clad mountains coming right down to the water’s edge. A great bowl of sunshine.
“The eye of a hurricane is an excellent place to reflect upon the puniness of man and his works. If an adequate definition of humility is ever written, it’s likely to be done in the eye of a hurricane.”
The Air Force man who made the arrangements for this broadcast, Major William C. Anderson, said that this relatively smooth flight was the best possible testimonial to the progress the hurricane hunters had made in flying these big storms, for Edna was no weakling. But he worried about it day and night until the flight was finished, for many strange things can happen. When Murrow and his crew were safely back in New York, Anderson turned in for his first good night’s rest in two weeks, duly thankful that it hadn’t turned out to be a “hairy hop.”