“On the rushing of the wings of the wind. It is indeed a knowledge which must be felt to be in its very essence full of the soul of the beautiful.” —Ruskin

A hurricane flight which proves to be rougher than usual is known among the hunters as a “hairy hop.” It is an amazing fact that there are men who want to come down to the airfield when a big storm is imminent and “thumb a ride.” Mostly, they are newspaper reporters, magazine writers, photographers, civilian weathermen, and radio and television people. Usually they are accommodated, if they have made arrangements in advance. Some of these rides have been quiet, like a sightseer’s trip over a city, while others have been “hairy.”

One of the first newspapermen to take a ride into a full-fledged hurricane was Milt Sosin of the Miami Daily News. In 1944, Milt read about men of the Army and Navy who were just beginning to fly into hurricanes and he became obsessed with the wish to go along. When he asked for permission, the editor said “No” in a very positive tone. He could see no point in having a good staff correspondent 186 dropped in the ocean during a wild ride in a hurricane. Sosin insisted and he was told to see the managing editor. He did and there was another argument. Sosin told him, “If I don’t, somebody else will and we’ll be scooped.” Reluctantly, the managing editor gave permission. But when Sosin asked the immigration authorities, they said “No. You have no passport, and you don’t know what country you may fall in.” They refused. Sosin hung around and argued. He pointed out that if the plane went down at sea, he wouldn’t need any passport to the place he was going, and they finally agreed.

Milt Sosin got his wish in full measure on September 13, 1944, in the Great Atlantic Hurricane which had developed a fury seldom attained, even in the worst of these tropical giants. It had crossed the northern Bahamas and was headed northwestward on a broad arc that was to bring its death-dealing winds to New Jersey, Long Island and New England. Already we have told the story of Army and Navy planes probing this big storm, including the pioneering trip by Colonel Wood and others of the Washington weather staff. At the end of this trip, Sosin was glad to be back on land and vowed, “Never again!” But, somehow, he still had the urge to see these storms from the inside and afterward was a frequent guest of the Navy and Air Force.

One of Sosin’s most interesting trips was on September 14, 1947, in a B-17. They took off from Miami. Al Topel, also from the Miami Daily News, went along to take pictures, and Fred Clampitt, news editor of Radio Station WIOD, was the other guest. The big hurricane was roaring toward the Bahamas with steadily increasing fury and the people of Florida were worried—and for good reason, for three days later it raked the state from east to west, killing more than fifty people and causing destruction estimated in excess of one hundred million dollars. By many observers it was 187 eventually rated as the most violent hurricane between 1944 and 1949.

They ran into it east of the Bahamas. As the plane burrowed its way through the seething blasts, Sosin wrote in his shaking notebook:

“This airplane feels as if it’s cracking up. Ominous crashes in the aft compartment accompany every sickening lurch and dive as, buffeted by 140-mile-an-hour winds and sucked into powerful downdrafts, the huge bomber bores through to the core of the storm.”

Sosin said that the pilot, Captain Vince Huegele, and the co-pilot, Lieutenant Don Ketcham, were literally wrestling with the hurricane in clothes sopping wet from perspiration and, as soon as they came into the center, began to take off their wet garments. Ketcham had “pealed down to his shorts before the plane plunged back into the mad vortex.”

At this point they were surprised to see another plane in the storm, a B-29, flying in the eye at thirty-six thousand feet, trying to discover the “steering level” where the main currents of the atmosphere control the forward movement of tropical disturbances such as this one. The radio man, Sergeant Jeff Thornton, was trying to contact the B-29, miles overhead, but with no luck. Sosin wrote in his notebook:

“But here at this low level we have more to worry about than trying to reach the other plane. We are getting an awful kicking around. Wow! That was a beaut. Al Topel was foolish enough to unfasten his safety belt and stand up for a better angle shot of the raging turbulent sea below. We must have dropped one hundred feet and his head hit the aluminum ribbing of the plane’s ceiling. Then, trying to protect his camera, he skinned his elbows and knuckles. Now he’s given up and has even strapped a safety belt around his camera.”

The crew was busy plotting positions and checking on the 188 engines. To them it was an old story, except that none could recall such violent turbulence. The craft was low enough for them to get glimpses of the sea but they wanted a better view and they began to descend cautiously. Sosin wrote:

“The turbulence is getting worse. The sea is streaked with greenish-gray lines which look like daubs made by a child who has stuck his fingers into a can of paint. Now we are closed in. We are flying blind. Capt. John C. Mays, the weather observer, starts giving the pilots readings from his radar altimeter while Huegele sends the plane lower and lower in an effort to establish visual contact with the sea.

“‘Five hundred feet,’ Mays calls into the plane’s intercom.

“‘OK,’ replies the skipper.

“‘Four hundred feet.’

“‘Roger.’

“‘Three-fifty.’

“‘Roger.’

“‘Two-fifty.’

“‘OK.’

“‘Two hundred feet,’ Mays’ voice is still even.

“‘OK,’ comes Huegele’s voice.

“It may be OK with him but it isn’t with me. I just found myself tugging tentatively on the pull toggles which will inflate my ‘Mae West’ life jacket if I yank hard enough. I checked a long time ago to make certain the CO cartridges were where they should be.

“Fred Clampitt, WIOD news editor, is turning green.

“No, it’s not fear. He’s sweating so much that the colored chemical shark repellent in a pocket of his life jacket is starting to run.

“Then we sight the sea again. From this low level the waves are frightening. They are traveling in all directions, not in just one, and they break against each other, dashing salt spray high into the air. It’s all too close.
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“Now the ceiling is lifting and we are climbing—250, 300, 500, 700 and we level off. It grows less turbulent and Observer Mays looks up from his deep concentration.

“‘I may be wrong,’ he says, ‘but it looks to me as if it’s made a little curve toward the north.’

“Which is very interesting—but more interesting is the fact that the day’s work is over and we’re on our way home.”

In 1947, the Air Forces were assigning B-29’s to their Kindley Base at Bermuda, to replace the B-17’s. The big superforts had room for guests and it soon became common to have somebody hanging around Kindley to get a ride. When a big storm was spotted east of the Windward Islands on the eleventh of September of that year, two newspaper reporters and a photographer from Life Magazine, Francis Miller, were waiting at Bermuda for a hop. The big hurricane became even more violent as it turned toward the southwest and swept across Florida. It was September 14th when Milt Sosin of the Miami Daily News got his “hairy hop” in this same blow. As it crossed the coast, winds of full hurricane force stretched over a distance of 240 miles and the wind reached 155 miles an hour at Hillsboro Light. By this time the hurricane hunters were fully occupied and the riders were left on the ground. Miami communication lines were wiped out and control of the hunters had been shifted to Washington. In charge of a B-17 at Bermuda was Major Hawley. His co-pilot was Captain Dunn, who had learned hurricane hunting in “Kappler’s Hurricane” and other earlier storms. Late on the seventeenth, as the storm roared across Florida with night closing in, Hawley had heard nothing from Washington about his plane going into it, so he gave up and told the riders to come back in the morning.

Early the next morning, one of the reporters, a staff writer for the Bermuda Royal Gazette, was sitting around in his shorts and thinking about breakfast when Lieutenant Cronin 190 rushed in and said they were ready to take off. The reporter started to get dressed, but Cronin said, “Let’s go. Just as you are. You may drown but you won’t freeze.” They stopped in Hamilton, got the other reporter and the photographer, and found Hawley walking up and down, impatiently waiting for last instructions. So the reporter took a trip of 3,350 miles in his shorts and had a bird’s-eye view of the southern Seaboard, the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico and a bad-acting hurricane.

It was a “hairy hop.” They had orders to refuel at Mobile, so they put down at the airfield there, all other planes having been evacuated the day before. An Air Force man came out and asked, “Where you goin’?” They told him and he turned around and shouted, “Some dang fools think they have a kite and can fly through a hurricane.” More men came out and they got gas in the plane. One big fellow said, “You can have your dern trip. But keep the storm away from here.” In twenty minutes they were in the storm. The crew members were bare to the waist, perspiration pouring down, water coming through the panel joints, and everything was wet and shaking. One of the reporters described it this way:

“Suddenly the plane keeled over on one side, the left wing tip dipped down vertically, and for a moment I thought the end had come. I gulped for breath as the plane dropped. The sea rushed up towards us; huge waves reared up and mocked us, clawing up at the wing tip as if trying to swallow us in one. A greater burst from the engines, a hovering sensation for a second and then, with the whole plane shuddering under the strain, our nose once again tilted upward. I felt weak and with difficulty breathed again.”

The plane had no radar and the crew had a lot of trouble trying to locate the center of the hurricane. The forecasters at Miami were anxious for an accurate position of the center. At that time airborne radars were being installed as standard 191 equipment as rapidly as they could get around to it but the B-17’s came last. Low pressure guided them, and they were trying to get into the part of the hurricane where they found the pressure falling rapidly. It was a big storm and they were having little luck in the search. “Lashed by winds and rain, the B-17 staggered across the sky,” one of the reporters said afterward. He went on to tell his story:

“I was growing sick in the bomb aimer’s bay stretched over a pile of parachutes and hanging onto the navigator’s chair for dear life. Some baggage, roped down beforehand, now lay strewn across the gangway. Parachutes, life jackets, water cans and camera cases were thrown about into heaps. The photographer, trying in vain to take pictures out of the window, was knocked down and sent flying across the fuselage. His arms were bruised from repeated efforts. My stomach was everywhere but where it should have been. Everything went black. The plane was thrown from side to side and the floor under my feet dropped. We emerged from a big cloud into an eerie and uncanny pink half-light. The photographer clambered from the floor and tried to look out. He thought the reddish light was an engine on fire.

“Before we touched down at Tampa, after four hours of flying around in the hurricane, we reporters and the photographer were exhausted. And even then they had failed to get into the calm center, although they had sent back to Washington a lot of useful information on the storm’s position.”

More than anything else, the preliminaries unnerve the guest rider. They tell him about the “ditching” procedures; that is, what to do if the plane is on the verge of settling down on the raging sea. Two or three hours before take-off they are likely to have a ditching drill, along with the briefing on the storm and the check on the equipment. The guest is told that if they bail out, he will go through a forward 192 bomb bay door. There is hollow laughter as someone makes it clear that there is very little chance of survival. But they want the guest to have every advantage.

Commander N. Brango of Navy reconnaissance says: “Yes, we get a good many requests from men who want to go along. Would you like to go on an eight- to ten-hour flight in a four-engine, thirty-ton, Navy patrol plane? You will probably see some of the beautifully lush islands of the Antilles chain, waters shading gradually from pale green to a deep clear emerald, shining white coral beaches, native villages buried in tropical jungles, and many other sights usually referred to in the travel advertisements.

“Doesn’t that sound enticing? There is just one catch. You may have to spend four to five hours of your flight-time shuddering and shaking around in the aircraft like an ice cube in a cocktail shaker, with rain driving into a hundred previously undiscovered leaks in the plane and thence down the nearest neck. You may bump your head, or other more padded portions of your anatomy, on various and sundry projecting pieces of metal (of which there seem to be at least a million). You may not be able to see much of anything, at times, since it will be raining so hard that your horizontal visibility will be nil, or you may be able to catch glimpses, straight down about 300 feet, of mountainous waves and an ocean being torn apart by winds of 90 to 150 miles per hour. There’s one thing I will guarantee you, you won’t be writing postcards to your friends saying, ‘Having a wonderful time, wish you were here,’ because you won’t be able to keep the pen on paper long enough to write much of anything.”

You have guessed by now that the carefully phrased invitation was just a trap to get you aboard one of the Navy’s “Hurricane Hunter” patrol planes as it departs on a hurricane reconnaissance mission. According to Brango, these 193 flights have been described by visiting correspondents, using “thrilling,” “awe-inspiring,” “terrifying,” and other equally impressive adjectives. A............