Part 12
"The rain was moderate at a distance from the center but already I was drenched because of a leaky nose in the ship. We flew almost completely around the center with nothing especially spectacular. At about twenty miles from the center we encountered severe turbulence which lasted only until the center was hit. During this time is when I found myself trying to code two weather messages at once and not doing a very good job on either. I actually was too busy to get very scared as to whether or not the plane would hold together. Between the severe turbulence and the water which by then had covered the entire desk, I could hardly read my own writing a half hour later when I was able to send the messages to the radio man. The turbulence near the center was of a nature I had never experienced previously. It was not a sharp jolt as experienced in a cumulus cloud but more of a rhythmic up and down motion. But on top of this there was a motion from side to side that made it especially rough.
"To me the most unwelcome sight of the whole trip was the swelling, churning sea. From nine hundred feet, which seemed to be our average altitude, the height of the spray above the ocean could not be determined. In places the surface was covered with sharp white streaks. If one thought for very long about what would happen to him if he were forced down upon this boiling ocean, he would be cured of hurricane flying for some time to come.
"The center was very welcome. The turbulence there was only light and the intense rain stopped completely. This gave me a momentary 'breather' so that I could swallow my stomach, assure myself that I was not sick, and code up a few back messages."
The morning crew went to Eglin Field and only one ship and crew was left at Morrison as the big storm closed in. The weather officer on this last flight was Lieutenant Edward Bourdet. He said:
"The weather during the entire morning at Morrison was bad. There were numerous thunderstorms with heavy rain showers that reduced visibility at times to less than one-quarter mile. Our flight took off at 10 A.M. We went just east of Miami where the wind was easterly at about fifty knots. We circled the storm center according to instructions and the wind went around from east to north and then through west to south. We experienced not only vertical currents but shearing horizontal currents. It is surprising that an airplane can hold together under such punishment. I found that there is no dry place in the nose of a B-25 in hurricane rain and I had to sit on the papers to keep them fairly dry, but I was also troubled in trying to keep myself from being battered against the side of the plane. We did not enter the eye of the storm but were in the northeast corner. The pilot later remarked, 'Our left wing tip may have been in the calm, but we sure as hell weren't.' It was here that I experienced the worst turbulence and the heaviest rain I have ever seen. The noise was terrific."
Lieutenant Bourdet added:
"The worst part of flying hurricanes is the fact that if there should be some trouble, structural or otherwise, that would force the plane down, the crew would not have a chance of getting out alive. The best part is the fact that you know that you are instrumental in providing adequate warning to all concerned and in saving lives and property."
During the time when these crews were flying into Kappler's Hurricane and sending reports to the Miami center, on September 15, the people of Florida were making last-minute preparations. Windows were boarded up, streams of refugees filled the highways, the radios were full of warnings, and the venturesome stood on the street corners as the gales began roaring in the wires and big waves came booming against the coast. Palm trees bent nearly double and debris began to fill the air. There was great damage at the Richmond Naval Air Base. Three big lighter-than-air hangars were destroyed. They collapsed in the wind at or near the peak of the hurricane and intense fires, fed by high octane gasoline, consumed the remains.
An investigating committee found that the winds must not have been less than 161 miles an hour to account for the bending of the large steel doors. Weather records recovered from the base indicated a two-minute wind of more than 170 miles an hour and as high as 198 miles an hour for a few seconds.
The center of the hurricane crossed the southern tip of Florida and moved up the west coast on the sixteenth as it turned north-northeastward, and then swept over Georgia and the Carolinas. Its center lay on the Georgia coast on the seventeenth. The boys who flew to Eglin Field had to take it again as its center came near and some of them flew into the hurricane after it passed Eglin. Among these was another weather officer, Lieutenant George Gray, who had seen this storm in several different places and now viewed it from the air as it whipped the Georgia coast. His report is worth reading:
"Riding through 'Kappler's Hurricane' was as rough a trip as I ever care to take. Admittedly, I know very little about flying from a pilot's point of view--how hard it is to keep a ship steady, the gyro, the cylinder head temperature, and all the rest that had the boys so worried. My criterion for roughness has always been how hard it is for me to hold on and how much the air speed fluctuates. We up front had to hold on with both hands when the going got bad. Some of the boys in back, we heard, with close to a thousand hours reconnaissance flying, actually got sick. The thing, though, that really frightened us was not the turbulence so much, because we had had to hold on with both hands before--it was the rain and the white sea below us.
"We saw the rain first from aloft. It looked absolutely black, as if a sudden darkness had set in in that part of the sky. The blackness seemed to hang straight down like a thick dark curtain from a solid altostratus deck at about fifteen thousand feet. How much further above this layer the build-up extended, I do not know. I kept thinking, 'We're not actually going into that.' We did though, and somehow with all the rush, we didn't have so much time to worry and become frightened as we expected. The rain was really terrific. It leaked in the nose and ran in a flood down the crawlway. The nose usually leaks and a soaking on a trip is not at all unusual, but this was different. I have never seen the water pour in and spurt so before. Where the plexiglass meets the floor section there was a regular fountain about six inches high that flooded the whole area. The noise was terrific. It pounded and crushed against the top and sides till we thought it would all collapse in upon us. I didn't notice any particular temperature change in the heavy rain though the pilots afterward all reported enormous cooling in the engines. Writing was almost impossible. The forms and charts on the table were like so much papier-mâché. There was no place that we could put them out of the water's way.
"We noticed the ocean particularly on the last day when the storm swept out to sea again off the Georgia coast. The day before on our way back to Morrison Field from Eglin where we rode out the blow, we flew low over the Everglades and saw roofless homes and millions of uprooted palmettos. The next day as we flew up the coast, we could see other remnants of the storm--huge pieces of timber, trees, roofs of outbuildings, and maybe even houses. The interphone was busy all the while as first one and then another of the crew saw something also afloat. As we got nearer the storm but still only in the scattered stratocumulus which is typical of almost any over-water flight, the rubbish seemed to disappear. Whether it was simply that the water itself was too rough for the timber to stand out or whether everything lay below the seething whiteness, I don't know. On our first trip into a tropical storm, the navigator kept repeating over the interphone, 'That water gives me the creeps.' It did. I kept thinking about ditching in it and floundering around in a 'Mae West'; I guess we all did. The waves were huge. Every now and then one would crest up and just as it was about to crash, the wind would grab hold of the foam and mist and crash it back into the sea. I took several pictures of the gradually heightening sea, though I doubt that its seething, alive look could be transposed to paper.
"We saw the storm hit the Carolina Cape. It was easy to see how trees in the Florida swamps without much root to grasp the earth were uprooted. Trees along the Carolina and Georgia coasts--big ones, taller than the houses in the vicinity--were bending before the blow the way wheat seems to ebb and flow in a summer's breeze. The seas were very high and in occasional breaks in the lower clouds we could catch glimpses of yellowish breakers and a littered beach. It looked as if the rain and thrashing surf had churned up the bottom, and mud had mixed with the foamy water. The shore was littered with debris, big trees, and blackened seaweed, mostly. As a sort of aside, on the matter of stirring up the bottom, we found several conch shells and bits of coral on the beach after the storm that are not considered native in these parts.
"Whether this next is typical of hurricanes or merely evidence that the storm had spent itself, I don't know, but I do think it worthy of mention. We noticed occasional breakups in the clouds--not large areas, just a few seconds when everything brightened and when the firm outlines of a large cumulus could be seen through thin low scud. This was not in the center but as much as forty miles away where the stuff should have been most solid and where the sea was near its roughest. I have seen the 'Eye' of a hurricane on land as a weather forecaster. At that time we noticed a real breakup with stars and moonlight visible. The wind and noise stopped for a while and we could see an occasional bulging cumulus through the night. Whether this phenomenon is due merely to less energy available over land than over water, I wouldn't even guess. In any event we noticed no such complete break in the eye at sea. In the center, so-called calm, though for my money it was mighty rough, about all that we noticed was that the pounding rain stopped for a minute or so. The clouds did not break clear through. There was a slight breakup to perhaps five thousand feet. There were bases of cumulus and several indefinite layers below this overcast though. The terrific bouncing around also stopped. We were out of the place in just a minute or two, so the eye couldn't have been much more than five miles in diameter. Some of the other ships circled in the center, saw a flock of birds milling around there, and noted violent up and down drafts near its edge. We were in and out of the thing so fast that, frankly, we hardly had time to notice anything. I think we could have fallen the seven hundred feet to the water without my knowing it, we were so busy with the camera, papers, and instruments.
"I might say a little more about the cloud formations we noticed since it was my job on this day to note them and take pictures of them while the other observer tried to compute pressure. Ahead of the storm here at Morrison Field on the morning of the sixteenth, we got a good picture of pre-hurricane thunderstorms. Squalls with forty-mile gusts swept across the runways. The rain came down in sheets so that we could watch it move toward us like a dark wall. Some of the boys out loading one of the ships for evacuation saw one of these terrific showers bearing down on them and they started to run for cover. The water was moving faster than they could run and before they'd moved fifty feet they were soaked to the skin. On the morning of the seventeenth, it lay just off the Georgia coast and had started to re-deepen. We flew up the eightieth meridian though it was hard to hold any steady course. As some of the navigators have probably mentioned, we could see our own drift. After we noted a good windshift into the east to assure us that we were in the northeast quadrant, we headed across current for the center and once there headed roughly for the great outside to the west. With such terrific drift, I don't see how anyone knew where he was going.
"Heading north: The usual over-water five-tenths stratocumulus bases at two thousand, tops at thirty-five hundred, gradually began to lower at about one hundred twenty-five miles from the center to roughly eight hundred feet, and a fairly solid lower layer of clouds. Flying above this layer at about forty-five hundred feet we could see tall bulging cumulus and thickening altostratus at about fifteen thousand ahead. There were other thin layers of stratocumulus and altostratus, but it wasn't until we got within fifty miles or so of the center and the rain really began to come down and the cumulus were as thick as trees in a forest that these intermediary layers began to thicken and thatch in between the tall cumulus the way they do in any well-developed storm system. By fifty miles out we were in solid cloud and heavy rain. Picture-taking became impossible except in the occasional breaks mentioned above. Even these breaks, if they should come out, would show little because continuous instrument weather, to me at least, looks pretty much the same whether it's part of a violent hurricane or smooth circulation stratus over a seaboard town. You can see the wing tips and not much more.
"If a general conclusion is necessary, mine would simply be that I'd just as soon not tempt fate in any more such storms."
Sometimes birds such as Lieutenant Gray describes are carried hundreds of miles before they escape from the hurricane. Species from Florida have been found as far north as New England.
_11._ TRICKS OF THE TRADE
_A gallant barque with magic virtue graced, Swift at our will with every wind to fly; So that no changes of the shifting sky, No stormy terrors of the watery waste, Might bar our course,_ --Dante
After two years of probing tropical storms by air, nearly everybody connected with the operation agreed that it was hazardous. But most of the men who were active in it had one main idea. As soon as the winds, rain, clouds, seas, and calm center of the average hurricane had been thoroughly mapped, a standard method should be devised for flying into the center and getting the vitally needed weather information en route with the least possible danger to the craft and crew. They thought of something like a football team, each man highly trained in a definite job, with faultless teamwork, and all members of the crew on the alert every moment.
Courses of instruction were organized. In all of them one fact became abundantly clear in the first two years. No two hurricanes are exactly alike. All of them are big compared with thunderstorms and tornadoes, but some are much larger than others. The recco crew may run into one in the uncertain stages of formation and at other times they may be nosing into an old storm with strange and unsymmetrical parts. Of certain elements they were reasonably sure--all these storms have clouds, rain, squalls, and central low pressure, with strong winds spiraling more or less regularly in a direction against the motions of the hands of a clock.
With these thoughts in mind, the instructors tried to devise methods that would prevent accidents. "What do you mean, accidents?" asked a junior weather officer at one of the conferences. "The whole thing is just one big accident, if you ask me. There's only one rule that's any good. Just be careful and don't fall in the ocean!" As a matter of fact, most of the rules had that one vital thought in mind, but there were different ways of doing it.
The Air Corps and Navy soon developed their own special methods. From the beginning the Navy preferred the low-level method; that is, they flew by the quickest route to the calm center of the storm, going in at a low level, generally at an elevation between three hundred and seven hundred feet. There are good reasons for this. Weather information--especially the facts they want about tropical storms--is vital to the safe operation of surface ships such as cruisers, destroyers and mine sweepers, and it is also used in the movement of aircraft from and to the decks of carriers. Task forces want to know about the speed and direction of winds at sea level, as well as the condition of the sea when storms are imminent.
It was the aim of the Navy to keep their weather reconnaissance aircraft below the level of clouds, where the aerologist could watch the surface of the sea as much of the time as is possible within the limits of reasonably safe operation. When in a tropical storm, the aerologist guided the pilot around or into the center. Down near the water, say one hundred to three hundred feet altitude, turbulence is apt to be very bad, sometimes extremely violent. Above seven hundred feet, clouds are likely to interfere and this was extremely dangerous at that altitude in those early years because the altimeter which they used to indicate height of the aircraft by pressure of the atmosphere was sometimes badly in error in a tropical storm. If the pilot and the aerologist lost sight of the water's surface for a few minutes, they suddenly found the aircraft about to strike the precipitous waves of a storm-lashed sea.
Pressure of the atmosphere falls with increase of elevation, roughly one inch drop in pressure for each one thousand feet. If we put an ordinary barometer reading 29.90 inches in a plane on the ground and go up one thousand feet, it will read about 28.90 inches. The pressure altimeter is a special type of barometer that shows elevation instead of pressure. When the pressure is 29.90 inches and the altimeter is set at 0, we go up to where the pressure is 28.90 inches and it reads one thousand feet. But if the pressure over the region falls to 28.90 inches and the altimeter is not adjusted, it will read one thousand feet at the ground and be roughly one thousand feet in error when we go up to where the reading is 27.90 inches.
In ordinary weather, big changes in the barometer take place slowly and there usually is plenty of time for correction. In a flight into a hurricane, big changes take place rapidly. The change caused by the plane going up may be confused with the drop in pressure in the hurricane. If the plane is in the clouds when these changes take place, the pilot may have a frightening surprise on coming into the clear again. More recently, the hunters have been equipped with radar altimeters which give the absolute altitude for check. They send a radar pulse downward and it is bounced back from the sea surface to the instrument. The time it takes to go down and back depends on the height--the higher, the longer it takes--and the instrument is designed to give the indication very accurately in feet. Thus, the radar altimeter removed some of the dangers of low level flight.
So the Navy hunters moved in at low levels, preventing the "mush from becoming a splash" as they put it, and although their experienced pilots were marvelously efficient in flying on instruments in clouds or "on the gauges," they kept the white welter of the storm-lashed sea in view whenever possible. Of course, it is not possible to fly straight into a storm center. The big winds carry the plane with them and so the pilot might as well use the winds to good advantage--he will go with them to some extent, whether he likes it or not.
If we imagine ourselves in the center of the hurricane, facing forward along the line of motion of the storm itself--not the motion of the winds around the center--we know that the safest sector to fly in is behind us on our left, and the worst is in front of us on our right. At the left rear, there is likely to be better weather--less dense cloudiness and not so much rain. The winds are not so violent. So the Navy pilot flies with the wind. He goes in until he has winds of, say, sixty miles an hour. He puts the wind on the port quarter and this carries him gradually toward the center of the hurricane.
When he gets the wind speed to suit him, he brings the wind between the starboard quarter and dead astern and flies ahead to the point where he thinks he has the best place to go for the center. According to Commander N. Brango, one of the Navy's top specialists in hurricane navigation by air, "Choosing the proper run-in spot is tricky business, for it is the point at which the wind is the reciprocal of the storm's direction of motion. The pilot must watch for this point carefully, as he may pass it quickly; if he does there is imminent danger that the drift may carry the aircraft into the most severe quadrant of the hurricane." So the pilot goes into the center without wasting any time. Delay results in fatigue and it is important that the men be freshly alert. The pilot puts the wind broad on the port beam and he cannot possibly miss the eye. The next thing, the plane is in that amazing region where the sea boils, the breezes are light or missing altogether, the rain has ceased and the clouds are arranged in circular tiers, like giant spectators in a colossal football stadium.
This is a marvelous place. The crew is at ease. Coffee goes around. In the last few moments before coming into the eye, the craft leaks like a sieve. Everything is wet but the squirting from a hundred crevices in the plane ceases in the center and now it is possible to do some paper work. The aerologist is busy with the weather code and the radio man begins pounding out a message. They circle around. The pilot takes them up to maybe five thousand feet altitude and back down again, circling around.
And then the time comes to leave the center. The pilot calls a warning over the phone and there are two or three wisecracks. But this departure from the eye is dangerous. The plane begins to catch the shear of powerful winds around the center. Here a man can get thrown around violently and be seriously hurt, if he fails to get a good grip on something or neglects his safety belt.
Now the pilot sets the wind broad on the starboard beam and both he and the co-pilot hang onto the controls. This is rough going and there may be some surprises, but after a little they are out of the big wind circle and the navigator thinks the gales are down to something like fifty knots. The pilot sets course for the Navy airfield and the staccato notes of the radio continue to carry vital weather information to the forecasters. On this subject, Captain Robert Minter, an old hand, at one time in charge of aerology in the Office of Naval Operations, is full of enthusiasm. He guaranteed that the Navy could get a ship off the ground on a hurricane probe within an hour after the Weather Bureau forecaster asked for the information.