Part 26

The radio operator, of course, is fully occupied and seldom has much time to see what is going on in the weather. He has two main troubles. One is static. When it is bad, all he can do is send a message blind and ask the ground station to wait. This may last for an hour or more. Various devices are used to reduce static interference but without complete success. As soon as the plane starts bouncing around, he has difficulty keying the message, not only because his body is shaking and swaying, but because it produces variations in the transmitter voltage and, on very high frequency, a drop below a certain critical voltage is likely to render the equipment inoperative.

To overcome a little of the trouble from turbulence, some radio operators in the early days tried strapping one arm to the desk, but one radio man, having just experienced a rough flight, said in his report that his arm didn't do a very good job unless he was there! Besides, he needed the arm to hold on with. More recently, it has been necessary to carry two radio men, and in fact this has become standard practice in most areas in the last year or two. It is very seldom that communications fail entirely but a plane on a storm-hunting mission that was out of contact with the ground station for much over an hour usually returned to base. Some aircraft on storm missions carry extra receivers and transmitters.

One navigator interviewed said that he is as busy as a one-armed paper hanger. He keeps track of the position of the plane by dead reckoning and by loran, which is "long range navigation," accomplished by receiving pulsed signals from pairs of radio stations on coasts or islands. It works well in the center of the storm, not so well elsewhere; in some parts of the hurricane belt, loran coverage has been poor. If it fails, the plane may go out to a point where the navigator can get a good fix by loran and do the dead reckoning from the center to this point.

Every few minutes, the navigator writes in his log a note about drift, compass heading, indicated air speed and time, and when it is rough bumps his head on the eye piece of the drift meter, the radar or something else. He takes double drift readings to get the speed of the strongest winds, figures the diameter of the eye and the exact location of the aircraft while in the eye, and passes this information to the weather officer or aerologist for his report. The duties are so numerous that the Navy usually carries two navigators "to produce pinpoint accuracy with limited celestial or electronic aids while being buffeted by one hundred-knot winds." Two are required largely because of frequent changes in heading and the nature of the winds in the Navy low-level style of reconnaissance. The Air Force uses two on daily weather reconnaissance and sometimes on storm missions.

In many respects, the weather officer, or "flight aerologist" as they call him in the Navy, is the key man on the mission. The plane is out for a series of weather reports and it is up to him to decide which is the best way to get what he wants. Within the limits of operational safety, his decisions are accepted. It is his job to keep track of the weather in every detail. He has a complicated form containing many columns in which he enters figures taken from code tables to fit the various elements--flying conditions, time, location, kinds of clouds, heights of cloud bases and tops, direction and distance of unusual phenomena, rain, turbulence, temperature, pressure, altitude, and every other conceivable detail that might be of use to the forecaster on shore. If he put this in plain language, the message would be as long as a man's arm and the radio operator might never get it off. There is an international code in figures for this purpose which makes it possible to put a very large amount of data in a brief message. And this is a continuous operation. Hardly does the aerologist get one message into the hands of the radio operator until he begins another one. It is his job to keep the pilot informed of the correct altitude. The weatherman is seated right out in front where the oncoming weather beats a terrific hubbub against the Plexiglas.

The radar operator may be one of the navigators. He keeps his eye on the scope. Many queer shapes come and go as the plane speeds along and the radar man has to know how to interpret them. He keeps the weather officer informed. Also, it may be his job to help the navigator guide the pilot around places where turbulence is likely to be excessive. Now and then, he or another crew member releases a dropsonde to get temperature, pressure, and humidity in the air between the plane and the sea.

The photographer has his troubles. Conditions are far from favorable and oftentimes impossible for taking pictures. One of his important jobs, and one that has been done exceedingly well by Navy photographers in the squadron headquartered at Jacksonville, is to get photos of the sea surface in winds of various forces from eight knots up to one hundred thirty knots. These photos are extremely useful in estimating the force of the wind by watching the effects on the sea.

In addition, there is an engineer. He looks after the overall operation of the plane and watches the many instruments on the panel. Usually he is a man of long experience who has worked up from crew chief. He adjusts power to fit the fuel load. If an engine catches on fire, he knows how to put it out. If a bail-out is imminent, he is the man on the job. Sitting behind the second pilot, he has his restless eyes concentrated on the mechanical equipment. All of these men on the plane work as a team, any of them being ready to help somebody else in an emergency, and alert and resourceful to take quick action when the unexpected happens, and it often does.

The crews are usually organized as follows: The senior pilot is in command--in the Navy he has the title of "Plane Commander" and the other pilot is the "Co-Pilot." In the Air Force the man in charge is the "Aircraft Commander" and his assistant is "Pilot." In any case, both of these men are heavily engaged in keeping the aircraft under control when the weather is rough. The pilots, together with two other men, the engineer and the crew chief, keep the plane in the air, though these latter two jobs may be combined, in which case the crew chief has an assistant--a flight mechanic.

Under the crew chief, or crew captain, there is one exceedingly important duty--watching the engines. On each side a man looks constantly for signs of trouble--oil leaks, fire, or whatever. These two men are sometimes called "scanners." White smoke or black smoke, as the case may be, on issuing from an engine signals a dire emergency. It may be only one or two minutes from incipient fire to explosion, and action must be immediate to put the fire out or correct other troubles. It is a very definite strain on the scanners to be alert every instant on a long flight, and various members of the crew may be rotated on these jobs. On routine daily reconnaissance in non-hurricane weather, the Air Force flights are long and some of the men feel decided relief on taking a hurricane mission, which is rougher but usually much shorter.

With this training and organization of the crews, most of the emergencies are met quickly and efficiently. Now and then, the unexpected happens, however, as is evident in the following instances.

In September, 1947, a number of missions by the Navy and Air Force had secured data in Hurricane George and the big storm was headed ominously toward Florida. An Air Force crew was in it on September 16 and had been in trouble. There were gasoline leaks, several fires, and engines acting up. They decided it was an emergency and set course for MacDill Field. Everything went well until they approached the field for a landing. There, in the middle of the runway, sat a big turkey buzzard. In the twinkling of an eye, when they were only fifty feet away, the great bird took off and smashed into the leading edge of the right wing. The impact made a sizable dent and the wing dipped. After six tries, the pilot skillfully got the plane down without an accident but the crew was more upset by this bird than by the average hurricane.

Sometimes the unexpected leads to disaster. One of the most unfortunate of these incidents occurred at Bermuda in 1949. There was a report of a disturbance in the western Caribbean on November 3. It was late in the season, but a few very bad hurricanes have struck in this region in November, so the forecasters at Miami asked for reconnaissance and the request was passed to the Air Force at Kindley Field, in Bermuda. It was afternoon when the message came. A B-29 with a crew of thirteen men was cleared for a flight through the storm area and thence to Ramey Air Force Base, in Puerto Rico, where they were to spend the night.

The plane took off at 6:17 P.M., Bermuda time, climbed to ten thousand feet and leveled off. Almost immediately the crew saw an oil leak in the No. 1 engine and it was feathered. The radio operator got in touch with the tower and airways and the aircraft commander prepared to return to the field. The pilot brought the plane over the island and reported at four thousand feet, descending. But just at that time a Pan American Stratocruiser was cleared to land. The B-29 circled and reported at one thousand five hundred feet at a distance of seven miles west of the island. Next the plane was four miles out, coming straight in at one thousand feet and was cleared to land on Runway 12.

There was a gusty cross wind and there were scattered clouds at one thousand feet. The plane then reported that it would pass over at one thousand feet and get lined up, but almost immediately said to disregard the last message. One-half mile away, the flaps were raised, the landing gear was let down, and power was applied on the three remaining engines. The plane made a left turn which became steeper and altitude was lost rapidly until the left wing hit the water. This was a quarter of a mile offshore. Fire broke out as the plane hit the water and rescue boats rushed to the scene. Only three men escaped, two of them miraculously through a hole in the fuselage, as was determined by a Bermuda diver who went down sixty feet in the water to examine the wreckage. The other man, captain of the aircraft, was pulled out but died later in the hospital. It was the two radar men who were fortunately in a position to get out through the hole in the fuselage and both survived.

In this incident at Bermuda the plane was not being affected by a storm. It is an amazing fact, in consideration of the very large number of weather missions flown by the Air Force after World War II, that their first plane to be lost while on reconnaissance in a tropical storm was in 1952. On November 1, a B-29 left Guam to fly into a typhoon called Wilma. The crew of the superfort was instructed to penetrate the storm, report by radio, land at Clark Field in the Philippines, and be prepared to fly through the typhoon again on the following morning. The same day, however, radio contact was lost. Seventeen rescue planes and numerous surface vessels searched the typhoon-torn waters near Samar Island for survivors without success. Natives on the island of Leyte reported that a four-engined plane was seen flying low in that vicinity but the report could not be verified.

The squadron to which this plane was assigned had made more than five hundred reconnaissance flights into typhoons between June 1, 1947, and the date on which it was lost.

Lieutenant A. N. Fowler, an experienced Navy pilot, was the man who said that a hurricane flight was like going over Niagara Falls in a telephone booth. Describing one of his most dangerous trips, he told a newspaperman:

"I have seen the hurricane-swept sea on many occasions, but it never fails to impress me in exactly the same way. It would be sheer turmoil, like a furious blizzard. While experiencing the jarring turbulence, the heat and drumming of torrential rain which seeps in by the gallon and tastes salty, the inside of a hurricane can be like a bad dream. Like having been swallowed by an epileptic whale, or going over Niagara Falls in a telephone booth."

On a less serious note but illustrative of the unexpected, there is the tale of the Navy crew and the hot water. They took off in a Privateer to fly into the center of a hurricane, each member of the crew having been assigned certain specific duties, as is always the case on these missions. The radar operator, among other jobs, was given the coffee detail. After a considerable period of moderate to heavy turbulence, with heavy rain leaking into the plane until everybody was thoroughly soaked, they broke into the clear in the eye of the hurricane, about twenty-five miles in diameter. The weather officer was busy with the coding of his latest observation, the radio operator was sending two messages that had accumulated, and the navigator was figuring the position of the eye and computing a double drift for wind. The co-pilot had the controls and was flying around the eye, preparatory to a descent as soon as the coffee had gone around.

The pilot called for coffee. The radar man dragged out two jugs, both still hot, and began to pour. He threw the first cupful under his seat and poured one from the other jug. Then he saw that he had brought two jugs of hot water and no coffee. "What the heck!" exclaimed the weather officer. "Why, you poor ----!" The navigator's words were scathing. He said that, according to the Bible, Noah was tossed overboard for less reason.

From the very beginning of reconnaissance, these missions have been co-ordinated according to instructions issued by a trio who serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also on the Air Co-ordinating Committee. Today the men are Brigadier General Thomas Moorman of the Air Force, Captain J. C. S. McKillip of the Navy, and Dr. Francis W. Reichelderfer, Chief of the Weather Bureau. There have been no serious accidents on the Atlantic side when planes actually were in hurricanes and there was no confusion in assigning planes until September, 1947. The men on the Committee at that time were Brigadier General Donald Yates and Captain H. T. Orville, in addition to Dr. Reichelderfer. They co-ordinated many operations in addition to hurricane reconnaissance and all had had long experience in aviation. Dr. Reichelderfer was formerly in charge of weather operations in the Navy, after long experience at sea and in the air. He was weather officer for Hindenberg on his flight around the world in a dirigible.

On September 18, 1947, the committee was surprised and alarmed by a report of reconnaissance. An Air Force plane out of Bermuda flew into a big hurricane which was moving west-northwest to the south of Bermuda and, after a rough time in the outer parts of the storm, finally found its way into the eye. Immediately they saw a Navy Privateer flying around in the center, also on reconnaissance, and they got right out of the eye and returned to base. There they made an official protest that there is not sufficient room for two planes in the center of the same hurricane. New instructions for co-ordination were issued immediately to all concerned. It is not surprising that this has happened on at least two other occasions, once with two Air Force planes and on another occasion with a commercial airliner.

In 1953 there was another bad accident, but not directly in a hurricane area. It resulted from a moderate hurricane named Dolly, which came from the vicinity of Puerto Rico on September 8 and moved toward Bermuda with increasing intensity. On the tenth, aircraft in the center estimated the highest winds at more than one hundred miles an hour, but on the eleventh it weakened and passed directly over Bermuda. There were strong gales at Bermuda, although the storm was diminishing in force so fast that no serious damage resulted.

On the tenth an Air Force plane from Bermuda flew into the hurricane. A Weather Bureau research man, Robert Simpson, went along to follow up on some studies he was making of the circulation at high levels in tropical storms. He reported:

"Dolly was an immature storm with most of the cloudiness concentrated in the northern sector. On the south and west sides, clouds rose only to around seven or eight thousand feet near the eye, except along the spiral rain bands which encircled the eye. The plane first investigated conditions at one thousand five hundred feet in the eye, where it was observed that there was a huge mound of cloud near the center with a moat or cloudless area which encircled this central cloud and separated it from the walls of the eye."

After this low-level exploration, the plane climbed to 29,500 feet, completing a spiral sounding in the eye. At this elevation or slightly lower, a complete navigation of the storm area was made, with dropsondes being released in strategic quarters, pressure and temperature gradients being measured along the track of the plane. There were two outstanding things observed during this flight at high levels: first, the sheer beauty of the storm itself, which could be viewed in excellent perspective, insofar as the cloud forms were geared to the wind circulations over hundreds of miles surrounding the eye. The only obstructions to vision at this elevation were the tall cloud walls which rose from the northern side of the eye. The second was a strong cyclonic circulation near thirty thousand feet over the eye itself which was surprising. Most theorists had figured that the cyclonic circulation would cease at high altitudes and possibly at very high levels become anticyclonic.

Simpson continued: