HURRICANE HUNTERS
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Who was first to intentionally fly into a hurricane? Popular legend harks back to a pair of Army Flight Instructors in early 1943. They were faced with a bunch of skeptical students--combat veterans from the war in Europe--who scoffed at the tiny training plane. So the chief pilot of the new instrument flying training school at Bryan, Texas, Joe Duckworth, decided to prove just what the AT-6 "Texan" could do, by taking it into the jaws of the worst weather on earth. Here's Navigator Ralph's first-hand account from their daring flight into a hurricane.
| Duckworth had a mind that there's no one that stupid to take a single-engine plane into a hurricane… that's not why we did it. In my opinion, he needed to establish that men flying an AT-6 in instrument conditions (would be) safe. His primary aim was to get the critics of the instrument proficiency checks in that aircraft eliminated. He had a lot of talented pilots to choose from, but he wanted me in the rear seat for an academic approach to the flight, because he knew we'd be busier than heck. We'd been through a lot together, so there was trust. There was no one in the Air Force who could have ordered me to do that; I love life too much. |
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What characterized that eye was the relief that I felt ... after what we'd been through, was immeasurable. Texas was still Texas. It went through our minds that we'd hit the jackpot, through luck. He called the Houston weather station, and they put out the longitude and latitude of the eye. The purpose of our flight was over after the transmission of the coordinates. We went straight back. Our primary tool was the radio compass. Kept a line of bearings from radio stations ...to pinpoint position. We were much more relaxed on the way back. We knew the "Alpha and Omega" of that hurricane. | 
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Later that day, Joe Duckworth returned to the hurricane with a meteorologist in the back seat. "The Bryan weather officer put it on the map. He made a "100" on that flight: found it, ID'd the eye, and got it out."
How does Ralph feel about his historic flight?
"It never was a dramatic thing to him or me. It was luck."