“Whirlwinds are most violent near their centers.” —Euripides

After war broke out in Europe in 1939, the job of finding and predicting hurricanes became steadily more difficult. Ships of countries at war ceased to report weather by radio and fewer vessels of neutral nations dared to risk submarine attack. After Pearl Harbor, the American merchant marine also stopped their weather messages and the oceans were blanked out on the weather maps. Already the British had been confronted by the lack of weather reports from the Atlantic and the seas around the British Isles, and this was extremely serious in their fight against Nazi air power.

Notwithstanding the alarming scarcity of planes for military purposes, the British were forced to send aircraft on routine weather missions. They usually flew a track in the shape of a triangle—for example, one leg of the triangle northwestward until well out at sea, a second leg southward across the ocean about an equal distance, and the last leg back to 91 home base. Other triangles were flown over Europe and back and over the North Sea. As time went on, the pilots of these observation planes gained much experience in flying the weather, including some fairly bad storms, but no one had occasion to fly into a hurricane. There was a good deal of talk about the situation in the United States in 1942, however, because of the danger that the West Indian region might become a theater of war, if the Nazi armies gained control of West Africa and attacked the United States by air, across Brazil and the Caribbean.

With this threat from the southeast, the United States took action, which was a repetition of the events during the Spanish War in 1898. Military weather stations were set up in the West Indies and aircraft were prepared to fly weather missions in the area. At the same time, the United States was getting ready to ferry planes across the South Atlantic via the Caribbean, the South American Coast and Ascension Island. It was very definitely evident early in 1942 that hurricanes might play a critical role if the West Indies became a theater of war. By 1943, however, there were two surprising turns of affairs. The Allies invaded Africa late in 1942 and the first flight into a hurricane center, unscheduled and unauthorized, came in 1943.

The first to fly into the vortex of a hurricane was Joseph B. Duckworth, a veteran pilot of the scheduled airlines, who was at the time a colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserve, in command of the Instrument Flying Instructors School at Bryan, Texas. It was one of those rare combinations of circumstances by which the man with the necessary skill, experience, daring, and inclination happened to be at the right place at the right time. With a full appreciation of the danger, he flew a single engine airplane deliberately into the hurricane and proceeded on a direct heading into the calm center, looked around, and flew back to Bryan. Spotting his 92 weather officer, he bundled him into the back seat and duplicated the feat immediately!

Joe Duckworth was born in Savannah, Georgia, on September 8, 1902, which, incidentally, was the anniversary date of the terrible Galveston disaster of 1900, and it was a hurricane at Galveston into which he flew in 1943. Joe’s mother was Mary Haines, a Savannah girl. His father, Hubert Duckworth, was a naturalized Englishman who had been sent to the States to take over the American cotton offices of Joe’s grandfather, after whom he was named. When Joe was two years of age, the family moved to Macon, Georgia, where his father was vice-president of the Bibb Manufacturing Company.

Joe’s first memory of anything connected with aviation was when his parents took him to the fair grounds at Macon to see Eugene Ely fly in an early Wright-type biplane. The wind was not right for a flight. Pilots were cautious in those days and Ely didn’t go up. Joe and his parents were looking at the plane when his father remarked, “You know, some day they will be carrying passengers in these things.” His mother answered, “Don’t be silly, Hubert, you might as well try to fly to the moon.” Joe had a vague idea at the time that he would like to fly when he grew up. Long afterward, he did. He says, “Many times in the nineteen thirties I captained an Eastern Airlines plane over Macon and looked down on the old fair grounds and recalled the thrill I had on seeing my first airplane and the remarks of my mother and father.”

After his father died in 1914, Joe attended Woodberry Forest School in Orange, Virginia, for three years and then went for two years to Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, graduating from there in 1920. In the meantime, his mother had moved to Atlanta and he continued his education for two years at Georgia Tech, and one year at Oglethorpe University. Nothing he did would take flying 93 out of his mind and he finally gained admission to the Flying Cadets. After going through both Brooks and Kelly Fields as Cadet Captain, he was graduated in 1928, the happiest year of his life. Later, while flying for Eastern Airlines, he got a law degree from the University of Miami.

With basic training of the kind that young Duckworth received as a Cadet, he was not fitted to fly into a hurricane or into any sort of really bad weather. Military operations at that time were strictly visual or “contact.” The problem was not how to get through bad weather—thunderstorms, low overcast, fog, for example—but how to keep out of it. There were few flight instruments, and there was no instrument flying training. At that time, dirigibles were thought by many leaders in aeronautics to have the best passenger-carrying possibilities for the future. Steel had just replaced wood in fuselages and airplanes in general had earned the description “heavier-than air.” On the other hand, the world had been electrified by Lindbergh’s flight to Paris in 1927 and other “stunt” flights became numerous. Another thrilling piece of news was Admiral Byrd’s flight to the South Pole in 1929.

Trial freight-carrying runs were being flown by the Ford Motor Company from Detroit to Chicago and from Detroit to Buffalo, and Joe heard that a young man could get tri-motor flight time as a co-pilot two days a week, provided he worked four days in the factory. Duckworth headed for Detroit. After getting on the job with Ford, he had his first serious run-in with clear ice, or freezing rain. The plane barely made South Bend Airport, coming in at high speed with a load of ice on the wings. Fifteen years later, the pilot on instruments would have climbed quickly into the warmer air at higher levels and then worked his way down to destination, but instrument flying was unknown at the time.

In the spring of 1929, Joe went with the Curtis Wright 94 Flying Service as their first instructor, at Grosse Ile, near Detroit. They were starting out to set up a nation-wide chain of bases with the idea of teaching everyone to fly. The plan was successful at first and in the fall Joe opened a branch at Atlanta, just as the stock market broke wide open. The slump in business that followed in 1930 caused general failure in the flying services. In December, Joe saw that the Atlanta branch was going out of business, and he went to work as a pilot for Eastern Air Transport, now Eastern Airlines, and remained with the company for ten years. At first he flew mail planes with parachutes but no passengers.

Even then there was no such thing as flying the weather. On his first mail flight, he got some pointed advice from the operations manager. He told Joe to be “sure to be on the look out for a reflection of the revolving radio beacon on the cloud ceiling and the moment you see such an apparition, you must get down immediately in an emergency field. If you let the overcast close down on you, you are strictly out of luck.” Airplanes were a long way then from being equipped to fly into hurricanes.

What little was known at that time about the temperature, pressure, and humidity in the upper air was secured by kites sent up daily at a few places. They were box kites, carrying recording instruments and flown by steel piano wire. Observers let them rise and pulled them in by reels and, after examining the records, sent the data to the weather forecasters. This was a slow process and, besides, it was becoming dangerous around airports where the data were needed most. A long piano wire in the sky was a serious hazard for aircraft. After 1931 this method was abandoned, and pilots under contract to the Weather Bureau attached weather-recording instruments to their planes and ascended to a height of three miles or a little higher, and on return gave the records to the weather observer, who worked them up 95 and wired the results to the forecasters. Army and Navy pilots carried out similar missions at military bases. This plan worked fairly well. The flights were made early in the morning but when the weather was bad and the data would have been most useful, the planes were obliged to remain on the ground.

Gradually, beginning about 1932, airline pilots began more and more intentional flights “on instruments,” that is, operating in clouds without visual reference to ground or horizon. Reliability of schedules was an economic necessity. Navigation by radio was becoming more of a commonplace and, by experiment and self-teaching, by 1940 airlines were flying almost all kinds of en route weather, including thunderstorms.

In 1940, Joe’s thoughts turned to the Army Air Corps, in which he held a reserve commission as Major. It looked as though war might come to the United States, so in November of that year he resigned from Eastern to enter active duty—probably the first airline pilot to do so. Assigned to the Training Command, he never got overseas—but what he did in teaching instrument flying throughout the Air Corps is still acknowledged and appreciated by thousands of wartime pilots. He received literally hundreds of letters expressing their gratitude, some of them declaring that the training they had received had literally saved their lives on many occasions.

Joe found a serious lack of instrument flight training in the Air Corps, due to the frenzied expansion of training for War. And, as Joe said, “You couldn’t call off the war when the weather was bad!” He set out to make his wartime mission the remedying of this situation, and the record will show he did a monumental job. Cutting “red tape” wherever possible, experimenting, lecturing, and writing a whole new system of instrument flying training, he and his chosen assistants 96 culminated two years of intensive effort by establishing an instrument flying instructors school at Bryan, Texas, in February of 1943. During the next two years, the school provided over ten thousand highly qualified instructors to the Army Air Forces, and attained a solid reputation which is not forgotten today. Joe’s instructors flew all types of weather—anywhere—and at the same time piled up a safety record unheard of at the time. The manuals they developed are still, in principle, the standard of today’s Air Force.

Joe’s school taught, through novel and thorough techniques, two things. First, that there is no weather, except practically zero-zero landing conditions, that cannot be flown by the competent instrument pilot, with proper equipment. Second, that the safety and utility of both military and commercial flight depend almost wholly on the competence of the pilot in instrument flying.

Thus it came about that the first flight into a hurricane center was not the result of a sudden notion but of years of intensive training in flying the weather, including storms, and the flyer who did it was probably the most expert in the world at getting safely through all kinds of weather. Looking at it from this point of view, it is not strange that there was a rather amusing sequel to this story, involving the other instructors at Bryan, Texas. But first we come to the story of the history-making flight by Colonel Duckworth.

Early on the morning of July 27, 1943, Joe came out to have breakfast at the field. The sky at Bryan was absolutely clear and it did not seem to promise any kind of weather that would try the mettle of men whose business it was to fly in stormy conditions. Someone at the table said he had seen a report that a hurricane was approaching Galveston. Joe was immediately attentive. Sitting opposite him was a young and enthusiastic navigator, the only one at the field, Lieutenant Ralph O’Hair.
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Thinking again about the fact that no one had flown a hurricane and that it ought to be easy because of the circular flow, Joe suggested to Ralph: “Let’s go down and get an AT-6 and penetrate the center, just for fun.” He said it would be “for fun” because he felt sure that higher headquarters probably would not approve the risk of the aircraft and highly trained personnel for an official flight. There were three or four newly arrived B-25’s at the field but Duckworth had not had the time to check out in one of them and therefore could not fly a B-25 (a twin-engine airplane) without going through some formalities. Use of the AT-6, of course, involved the danger that its one engine might quit inside the hurricane and they would be in trouble.

Lieutenant O’Hair was quite willing—enthusiastic in fact—and the pair gathered such information as was available about the hurricane and made ready for the flight. They took off in the AT-6 shortly after noon. The data on the storm had been rather meagre. Two days before, Forecaster W. R. Stevens at New Orleans had deduced from the charts that a tropical storm was forming in the Gulf to the southward. He drew his conclusion almost solely from upper air data at coastal stations, for no ships were reporting from the Gulf. On the twenty-sixth, Stevens had correctly tracked it westward toward Galveston (quite a feat in view of the lack of observations) and warnings had been issued in advance.

On the morning of the twenty-seventh, this small but intense hurricane was moving inland on the Texas Coast, a short distance north of Galveston, and by early afternoon the winds were blowing eighty to one hundred miles an hour on Galveston Bay and in Chambers County, to the eastward of the Bay. Houston and Galveston were in the western or less dangerous semicircle, a favorable condition for the flight from Bryan to Houston. Soon after leaving Bryan, the venturesome airmen were in the clouds on the outer rim of the 98 storm—with scud and choppy air—and shortly after they ran into rain. Precipitation static began to give them trouble in communications but there was no other serious difficulty.

As they approached Houston, the air smoothed out, the static leaked off the plane, the radio was quiet, and the overcast grew darker. They called Houston. The airways radio operator was surprised when they said their destination was Galveston.

“Do you know there is a hurricane at Galveston?” the operator asked.

“Yes, we do,” said O’Hair. “We intend to fly into the thing.”

“Well, please report back every little while,” the operator requested. “Let me know what happens.” Evidently, he wanted to be able to say what became of the plane if they went down in the storm.

At this point Joe’s mind began to run back over some of the lectures the flight instructor had given and recall how they had stressed the fact that a pilot should always have an “out,” even if it meant taking to a parachute. He wondered what it would be like to use a parachute in a hurricane. They were flying at a height of four thousand to nine thousand feet.

As they approached the center, the air became choppier again and he said afterward that they were “being tossed about like a stick in a dog’s mouth,” without much chance of getting away from the grip of the storm. Checking on the radio ranges at Houston and Galveston, they flew over the latter and then turned northward. Suddenly, they broke out of the dark overcast and rain and entered brighter clouds. Almost immediately, they could see high walls of white cumulus all around the circular area in the center and, below them, the ground and above the sky quite clearly. The 99 plane was in the calm center. The ground below was not surely identified but it seemed to be open country, somewhere between Galveston and Houston. They descended in an effort to get their position more clearly but the air became rougher as their altitude decreased. This led Duckworth to the conclusion that the eye of the hurricane was like a “leaning cone,” the lower part probably being restricted and retarded by the frictional drag of the land over which the storm was passing. They flew around in the center a while and then took a compass course for Bryan.

Once out of the center, the plane went through, in reverse, the conditions the fliers had experienced on the way in, arriving at the air field at Bryan in clear weather. When they got out of the plane, the weather officer, Lieutenant William Jones-Burdick, came up and said he was very disappointed that he had not made this important flight.

Duckworth said, “OK, hop in and we’ll go back through and have another look.” So he and the weather officer flew into the calm center again and looked around a while. The weather officer kept a log from which the following excerpts are taken, beginning with their entry into dense clouds on the way into the hurricane. The time given here is twenty-four-hour clock. Subtract 1200 to get time (P.M.) by Central Standard.
100
1715     Heavy rain, strong rain static.
1716     Rain continues but static only moderate. Some crash static intermittently.
1720     Getting darker, cloud more dense, rain very heavy, turbulence light. Rain static building up, blocking out Galveston radio range intermittently.
1725     Turbulence light to moderate, rain very heavy.
1728     Altitude 7300′. Free air temperature 46°, cloud getting somewhat lighter.
1730     Rain less heavy, cloud much lighter, ground visible through breaks. Surface wind apparently South Southeast.
1735     Crossed east leg of Galveston range and changed course to 330°.
1740     Now flying in thick cloud. Turbulence smooth to light.
1743     Turbulence moderate.
1744     Turbulence moderate to severe.
1745     Sighted clear space ahead and to the left.
1746     Now flying in “eye” of storm. Ground clearly visible, sun shining through upper clouds to the west. Circling to establish position. Surface wind South.
1753     Still circling. Altitude 5000′, temperature 73°.
1800     Headed west for Houston. Cloud very dense, rain light, turbulence moderate, intermittent precipitation static.
1805     Apparently in a thunderstorm. Altitude 5500′. Heavy rain, turbulence moderate to severe. Free air temperature now 46°.
1815     Changed heading to 10°. Rain light to moderate. Turbulence light.
1825     Headed 330°. Rain very light, turbulence almost smooth. Apparently flying between thick cloud layers.
1835     Altitude 5500′. Broken stratocumulus clouds below, high overcast of altostratus above.
1836     Breaking out into the open with high altostratus deck above.
1900     Landed at Bryan. Sky clear to the northwest.

One sequel to this story was Duckworth’s discovery, a year later, that after these flights into the center, some of his instructors and supervisors who were checked out in B-25’s had sneaked out and flown the same hurricane! They were afraid to tell him about it at the time, for they did not have 101 permission to do it, but he accidentally learned about it the next year, when he overheard some of them talking about their trips into the storm.

Altogether, Joe did not consider his flights into the hurricane to be as dangerous as some of his other weather flights. Only two things worried him at the time, the heavy precipitation static and the possibility that heavy rain might cause the engine to quit. Afterward, when pilots began to fly hurricanes as regular missions, the effect of torrential rain in lowering engine temperatures proved to be a real hazard and they had to take special precautions on this account.

Considering his hurricane penetration a routine weather flight at the time, Joe thought nothing more about it until he read a story in a Sunday paper, several weeks later. Then he had a telephone call from Brigadier General Luke Smith, at Randolph Field, who asked him to come down, and surprised him by saying that he knew of the incident. At Randolph, the General said that Joe was being recommended for the Distinguished Flying Cross. This never went through but later Joe did receive the Air Medal.

There were several amazing features about these flights into the vortex. First, they justified Duckworth’s unswerving confidence in his ability to fly safely through a hurricane; second, at the level of high flights there was a remarkable absence of violent up drafts or turbulence; third, they showed that quiet air in the center extended at least to heights of a mile to a mile and a half, and that at those levels the air in the center was much warmer than the air in the surrounding region of cloud, rain, and high winds. Joe is sorry now he did not organize his flight to get better scientific data. He believes his air temperature gauge probably was inaccurate. But, as he says, “It was just a lark—I didn’t think anybody would ever care or know about it!”

This demonstration was followed by an increasing number 102 of penetrations by aircraft into the eyes of tropical storms, not all of which, by any means, were as uneventful as the flights by Duckworth and his fellow officers. After years of experience, the military services involved in flying hurricanes developed a technique which was essentially the same as that used by Duckworth in this first flight; that is, penetrate into the western semicircle and then into the center or eye from the southwest quadrant.