Part 8

After three hours, the typhoon began to abate and the commander was feeling a little easier about his damaged ship until one of the officers reported that they had sprung a leak. The compartment containing the fore magazines was flooded and soon filled up. "So the destroyer went her way," the commander reported, "with her nose down and her tail in the air." She made it to the mouth of the Yang-tse at 11:00 A.M. Up the river a distance they found their companion destroyer. Its commander had been much impressed by the blue sky and calm in the vortex, also by the large number of birds, mostly kingfishers, that came on board.

Examination of the _Exe_ showed that a part of the bottom had been battered in, shearing the rivets and opening the seams. After thinking about his good fortune in coming through the typhoon, the commander wrote in his report: "When I recall (which I can without any trouble) those awful belly-floppers the craft took, and realized by inspection in dock what amount of holding power a countersunk rivet can possibly have in a three-sixteenth of an inch plate, I wonder that I am now in this world." Actually, the commander of the _Exe_ had escaped the worst of it. If he had missed the vortex and had passed through the right edge, where the forward drive of the typhoon was added to the force of the violent inner whirl, he might not have lived to tell the story. Many others have failed under similar circumstances.

Shanghai suffered severely from this typhoon. A flood in the river and on a low-lying island drowned five thousand Chinese.

All these accounts agreed on one thing--the ring of gales around the center. Some were more violent than others but the ring was always there. On the eye of the hurricane, however, there was less agreement. A strange case was the experience on the American steamship _Wind Rush_, in October, 1930, off the west coast of Mexico. She was caught in a violent hurricane and the master suddenly saw that the ship had passed into the vortex. The second officer, in his report, said: "From 9 A.M. to 10 A.M. we were in a calm spot with no wind and smooth sea, and the sun was shining."

There have been similar instances of vessels in the vortex of hurricanes without much disturbance of the sea, but these are exceptions. Most of them have reported confused cross seas, described as "pyramidal" or "tumultuous." In November, 1932, the master of the British steamship _Phemius_, on a voyage from Savannah to the Panama Canal, was so unfortunate as to become entangled in the outer circulation of a late-season hurricane moving westward in the Caribbean Sea. It turned sharply northward and the _Phemius_ was trapped by the ring of fierce gales in the central region. She rolled through an arc of 70° while the gusts came with such force that the funnel was blown away. The master put the wind at two hundred miles an hour. Hatches were blown overboard like matchwood, derricks and lifeboats were wrecked, and the upper and lower bridges were blown in. The ship was rendered helpless and was carried with the hurricane in an unmanageable condition.

Twice the _Phemius_ drifted into the vortex, with high, confused seas and light winds. The second time the vessel was besieged by hundreds of birds. They took refuge in every part of the ship but lived only a few hours. Driving toward the coast of Cuba, the hurricane ravaged the town of Santa Cruz del Sur, hurling a tremendous storm wave across all the low ground, engulfing the town, and drowning twenty-five hundred persons out of a population of four thousand. The _Phemius_ was left behind in a helpless condition and was taken in tow by a salvage steamer.

The width of the eye of a hurricane commonly varies from a few miles to twenty or twenty-five. The smallest known was entered by a fishing boat, the _Sea Gull_, in the Gulf of Mexico, on July 27, 1936. The master, Leon Davis, was fishing a few miles east of Aransas Pass, Texas, when he became involved in a small hurricane. "Suddenly," Captain Davis said, "the wind died down, the sun shone brightly and the rain ceased. For a space of about a mile and a half, a clear circular area prevailed; the dense curtain of rain was seen all around the edge of the circle; and the roar of the wind was heard in the distance." On the other hand, one of the largest eyes yet known attended a big hurricane in October, 1944. It blasted its way across Cuba and entered Florida on the west coast, near Tampa. As it neared Jacksonville, the calm center was stretched out to the remarkable distance of about seventy miles. This was a kind of freak; some of the storm hunters thought that it had been distorted and finally drawn into an elongated area by its passage over the western end of Cuba.

All of the available records of this kind were consulted in due time by the men who were assigned to the perilous duty of flying military planes into the vortices of hurricanes in the West Indies and into typhoon centers in the Pacific. But one of the best of these reports--of weather and sea conditions observed on many ships caught at the same time in the central region of a big typhoon--was not available until long after it happened. The Japanese kept it secret for seventeen years.

The reason for keeping the data secret was the fact that while on grand maneuvers, the RED Imperial Japanese Fleet was outmaneuvered by a pair of typhoons and was caught in the center of one of them and severely damaged. It happened in 1935 and was not reported for publication in America until 1952.

Just how this happened is not altogether clear. It was in the middle of September, 1935, when the first typhoon appeared, northwest of the island of Saipan. It increased in fury as it moved slowly toward Japan. On the twenty-fifth it crossed western Honshu and roared into the Sea of Japan, headed northeastward in the direction of the Japanese Fleet. Soon after this, it dissipated. Before it weakened, however, another typhoon had formed near Saipan and started toward Japan. It turned more to the northward than the first typhoon and missed Japan altogether. As it approached Honshu, late on the twenty-fifth, the RED Imperial Fleet was passing through the Strait of Tsugaru into the Pacific--squarely in front of the typhoon center.

The logical explanation for this apparent blunder is that the commanders wanted more sea room than was at hand in the northeast Sea of Japan to maneuver in the first typhoon and hoped to get well out in the open Pacific before they could be cornered by the second one. But it turned northeastward and went faster and farther out in the Pacific than they had expected. In fact, its forward motion was more than forty miles an hour in these last hours before its furious winds surrounded the fleet.

It was a bad calculation for the naval commanders and perhaps for the weather forecasters. Among the latter, H. Arakawa, one of the foremost typhoon students in Japan, was then on the staff of forecasters in the Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo. He was in part responsible for the predictions. In 1952 he made the report which was published by the U. S. Weather Bureau early in 1953. Taking the view of the weatherman, Arakawa said that although the damage to the fleet was unfortunate, there was _fortunately_ a magnificent collection of reports from the central region of the typhoon for scientific study.

The fleet was caught in the central part of the big storm on the twenty-sixth of September. Among the ships involved, many of them damaged, were destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, a seaplane carrier, mine-layers, transport ships, submarines, torpedo boats, and a submarine depot ship. The fleet suffered damage mostly from the tremendous waves in the right rear quadrant of the typhoon. Here the rapid forward motion of the storm was added to the wind circulation and the seas were driven to excessive heights. In his report, Arakawa had a footnote: "The bows of two destroyers, _Hatsuyuki_ and _Yugiri_, were broken off as a result of excessive storm waves, and many officers and sailors were lost."

In the calm center, the clouds broke and faint sunlight came through. The diameter of the eye was nine or ten miles. To the right of the eye, some of the waves measured more than sixty feet in height. The maximum roll of the ships in this area--the total angle from port to starboard--reached 75° on some of the ships. The wind was steadily above eighty miles an hour; the gusts were not measured but probably went as high as 125 miles an hour.

Many of the ships took frequent observations while in the typhoon and the data would have been extremely valuable if released to the storm hunters at that time, but when the report was published in 1953 a great deal of new data had been obtained by airplane, both at the surface--where Arakawa's observations were confined--and at higher levels. It was a little more than nine years after this Japanese incident when the U. S. Third Fleet was caught in a typhoon east of the Philippines and suffered at least as much damage as the Japanese in 1935.

One fact is clear. For many years the storm hunters had been gathering information about hurricane and typhoon centers from observations on land and sea but they knew very little of what went on there in the upper air. World War II brought a new era.

_7._ FIRST FLIGHT INTO THE VORTEX!

"_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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.