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 eachside 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 in1949. 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 examinethe 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. Likehaving 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 seriousaccidents 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 thestorm 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:
“By the time the plane had returned to Bermuda it was evident that Dolly was bearing down upon the island itself and that everything had to be evacuated. All of the planes were flown out to the mainland and the buildings battened down for the big blow. I spent most of the time in the weather station with my eyes glued to the radar scope. As the storm approached, and the winds rose, one rain band after another passed over the station, each with evidence of a little more curvature than the preceding band.
“Finally, the scope indicated a circle with a five-mile area free of any radar echoes. It was bearing down directly upon Kindley Field. Oddly enough the pressure had not begun to fall and the wind was holding steady. Another odd thing was that during the reconnaissance the eye had been twenty-five miles in diameter. However, this eye was only four to five miles in diameter. The eye arrived, the rain stopped and then resumed as the eye passed over the station, yet the pressure only leveled off briefly and the wind only subsided slightly without shifting. We had been tricked! This was not the real McCoy, it was a false eye. Subsequently, two other false eyes appeared on the radar scope and we had about decided that the storm had no organized central circulation left when the real thing finally showed up on the scope, still twenty-five miles in diameter.”
In the reconnaissance of Hurricane Dolly, many feet of radar pictures were made of the spiral bands of the storm. When it became clear that all planes would have to be flown to the mainland because of the approach of Dolly to Bermuda, the film pack used on the reconnaissance was left in the plane so that additional pictures could be made on the flight back to the mainland. Not only was this done, but also an additional eye dropsonde was obtained during the trip to the mainland. It was agreed that as soon as the plane returnedto Bermuda after the storm had passed, the film and additional records would be mailed to Washington.
On its flight from the mainland while returning to Bermuda, the plane exploded in mid-air 150 miles off the coast, near Savannah, Georgia. It had the records, the radar film, the dropsondes taken in the eye, and other data. In this case, the No. 4 engine had “run away,” throwing its prop, which struck Engine No. 3, and the latter exploded. The plane fell out of control. Eight of the crew were rescued but none of the records or data of the reconnaissance was saved. This plane, however, was not on a storm mission at the time.
The unexpected appearance of a small eye on the radar scope is not uncommon. The Navy’s instruction to its crews says: “During the final minutes of the run-in, radar may prove to be more of a hindrance than a help. There can be a number of open spots close to the true eye which might appear as eyes on the radar screen. You should not chase these false eyes!”
Out in the Pacific, the typhoon chasers say: “False eyes are often found in weak storms and care must be taken not to confuse them with the true eye of the typhoon. On the radar scope they may present an appearance much like the true eye but will not remain on the scope for any length of time. By continually scanning the suspected eye with several sweeps, the radar observer will see that the false eyes are surrounded by fuzzy cloud formations rather than a heavy ring of cloud characteristic of the eye.”
When Hurricane Carol of 1954 was approaching the New England Coast, the last penetration was made by a Navy plane with Lieutenant Commander R. W. Westover as pilot and Lieutenant C. W. Hines as co-pilot. On the way into the storm circulation, Hines was telling Westover about his family’s experience in the New England hurricane of 1938.The family residence was on Cape God. It was blown into the water and drifted until it lodged against a bridge, obstructing navigation. Finally, it was necessary to dynamite the wrecked house to clear the channel. The Hines family rebuilt their home and took out hurricane insurance. They carried the insurance until June 1, 1954, and then let it lapse.
As the recco plane flew into the center of Carol on August 30, the crew was watching a Moore-McCormack ship in the stormy seas below and sympathizing with the people on board who were suffering such rotten weather, but Hines was saving his sympathy for his family on Cape Cod. He was sure that Carol was going to blow their home into the water again, and afterward he learned that it did.
Although Carol of 1954 received a great deal of publicity because of death and destruction in New England, Westover, who also flew into Hurricane Carol of 1953, says that it was a much more violent hurricane than the one in 1954. The first Carol was so bad that only one low-level penetration was attempted. His crew recorded pressure 929 millibars in the center—about 26.80 inches—and they recorded 87½° drift. But fortunately the earlier Carol remained out at sea throughout its course.
Hurricane Hazel, later in 1954, gave another Navy pilot, Lieutenant Maxey P. Watson, an experience of the same kind that Lieutenant Hines had. The storm was approaching the coast of South Carolina when Watson flew his plane into it and he saw the center passing inland not far from the town of Conway, which was his home.
Hazel was responsible for other unexpected incidents here and there during its ravages from the Caribbean to the northeastern part of the United States. One case was on a Navy plane commanded by Lieutenant G. J. Rehe. Watson was the pilot on this trip, also. They took off from PuertoRico and flew into the storm as it was turning northward and passing out of the Caribbean.
Up to that time, Hazel was not much of a storm. Westover flew into it after it passed Grenada and found that it was not a well-organized cyclone. Rehe had gone into it on the first penetration and reported winds of eighty-five knots. Westover found the area almost cloudless but ninety-knot winds in one area. However, after its northward motion began, it was a very dangerous wind system, which was responsible for the only injury to a Navy crewman in their many flights into this particular hurricane.
Because of the severe turbulence that had developed quickly in Hazel, all the crew members on this flight were fastened in with safety belts, as is usual in such cases, but the photographer wanted to get up and take a picture. So he got out of his safety belt and had another crew member unfasten himself and hold him while he took the picture. In the sudden very violent turbulence, both were thrown against the overhead. On his descent, the photographer caught his arm between the cables and the fuselage and broke his shoulder blade. The other crewman was knocked unconscious.
Out in the Pacific, an Air Force pilot, Captain Leo S. Bielinski, had an experience which induced him to go to great lengths of experiment and ingenuity in an effort to find an easier way to track typhoons and hurricanes. It was in May, 1950, when a typhoon called Doris was growing to maturity while near the island of Truk and showed signs of changing its path, threatening the base at Guam. On May 8, an RB-29, under the command of Captain Cunningham, was sent out to penetrate the storm. Bielinski went along.
At that time Leo had a fine wrist watch in which he took much pride. A man in uniform has few things that are different from the other men, but Leo secured an expression ofindividuality through a wrist watch. He bought a very special one for a hundred dollars and admits that he frequently looked at it when he really didn’t care what time it was.
On this first trip into Doris, everything went smoothly. The crew members were instructed to land at Iwo Jima, when another plane would take over. But before landing they found that the hydraulic system needed repairs. Cunningham brought the plane down skillfully and they worked all night making repairs with parts salvaged from another plane on the field. The plans were changed and they were assigned to the next mission. The next morning they were airborne again for another penetration. This confirmed the northwest movement of Doris, which would take the most violent winds away from Guam, so they returned to Iwo Jima, well worn-out by two successive flights and thinking about a little rest, when Commander Cunningham received the following message: “Unable to get relief; request you make afternoon fix.” So the same crew turned around and started the third mission. The other two flights into this storm had been uneventful, they were tired, and Leo didn’t bother to fasten his safety belt.
Wham!Suddenly he found himself floating in the air around the cockpit. Before he could get his bearings, he was thrown violently against a bulkhead and slowly came to the realization that the bits of junk dangling in his face were the remains of his hundred-dollar wrist watch. This bothered Bielinski more than a broken arm or a twisted vertebrae. He started studying typhoons with a determination to find a better way to keep track of them. The results are described inChapter 17.
In other ways the unexpected can be serious. One experience is cited by Captain Ed Vrable, who was navigator on aflight into a hurricane in 1953. After a careful approach, the aircraft suddenly popped into the eye, but it was only about eight miles in diameter. It was not easy to circle a superfortress in this small eye. At one point, the turning arc was a little too broad and the aircraft edged out into the winds on the border. It was instantly tossed back into the eye, almost upside down, and he had the worst fright of his career in the reconnaissance business. But the pilots made a skillful descent until they managed to get the plane into the correct attitude and finished the flight.
In Hurricane Edna, in 1954, a crew of hunters in a WB-29, in command of Captain Charles C. Whitney, had an unexpected duty. They had spent part of the morning and the afternoon of September 14 in the eye of the hurricane. They flew in tight little circles, dodging the wing-shuddering winds on the periphery. Because the Weather Bureau forecasters were afraid of a repetition of a sudden speed-up like that of Hurricane Carol two weeks before, they had asked for a continuous watch. Captain Whitney and his crew were in there for nine hours.
And then, with gas getting low, they ran into the unexpected. Some eleven hours after take-off from Bermuda, the aircraft picked up a radio message that the Nantucket lightship, torn from her moorings by terrific winds, was adrift and at Edna’s mercy. The WB-29 plunged into 145-mile-an-hour winds in search of the vessel.
Picking up the lightship by radar, the weather plane shepherded the hopelessly lost ship, remaining overhead until a Coast Guard rescue plane arrived.
Waves seventy feet high seemed to toss the stricken vessel into the air to meet the low-flying aircraft pressed down by Edna’s raging winds. It felt, the crew said later, as if the plane were dancing on her tail.
With the arrival of the relief plane, the WB-29 turned landward. After sixteen hours in the air, and with the gas gauge hitting the low side of the dial, the weather plane made a landing at Dover, Delaware.
According to the Air Force, “This flight was one of the most dramatic missions in peacetime Air Force history.”
“I wield the flail of the lashing hail,And whiten the green plains under;And then again I dissolve it in rainAnd laugh as I pass in thunder.”—Hebert
“I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain
And laugh as I pass in thunder.”
—Hebert
At first thought, most people would say that fighting hail has nothing to do with hunting hurricanes, but in one instance it did. It is an interesting story which shows how men will take risks in trying to control the weather. The story ends with one man giving up his life in a sensational adventure with a mysterious conclusion.
Destructive storms are not very frequent in any one place but most people are under the impression that they are. They are apt to remember bad weather and forget about the good. Losses of life and property and failures of plans and business enterprises are caused by storms or the wrong kind of weather and such things are impressed on their memories. When rain is needed, it may fail altogether or come in suchquantities that fields and roads are washed out and there are floods in the rivers. A thunderstorm brings rain but sometimes hail comes with it, destroying crops and damaging property.
People have tried to overcome these bad effects of the weather in many ways. Irrigation has long been practiced in regions with scanty rainfall. Air conditioning affords relief from excessive heat. In many other ways, some foolish and some dangerous, men have tried to influence the weather. An interesting case of this kind which appealed to the imagination of people in many countries started near the beginning of the present century. It was an international battle against hail. Its origin was in the vineyards of Italy. Hail had done great damage there year after year, and finally an Italian got the idea that he might destroy hailstorms by shooting into them when they were just beginning.
In those years, cannon were used in battle. Loaded with big charges of gunpowder, these cannon hurled solid, heavy balls at enemy cities, forts, fleets, and troops. In time of peace, there were many of these old cannon around, serving no useful purpose, and the Italian had no trouble in getting one to try on hailstorms. But he was not permitted to use a cannon ball. It might have crashed into a neighbor’s house or killed somebody in the vineyards. So he loaded it with gunpowder and fired it at the storm cloud, hoping it would create a disturbance in the atmosphere and weaken the hailstorm.
It is an amazing fact that the vineyard of this Italian was damaged far less by hail than those of any of his neighbors, and the next year others tried firing a cannon with similar success. They became expert at it and learned how to load a cannon so that it cast a big, whirling smoke ring into the thunderstorm cloud. The news spread to other countries and in two or three years there was a lot of hail shooting indifferent parts of the world. So they held an international hail-shooting congress where they exchanged ideas and narrated their experiences. By the time the second world congress on hail was held, a great deal of uncertainty had developed. It seemed that the first hail shooters had begun work at a time when it just happened that there was much less than the usual amount of hail. Also, there were explosions and people were hurt. One man was killed and another had an arm blown off. After a few years, all the hail shooting ceased.
Even today, there is a good deal of mystery about the formation of hail and many people think there are ways of preventing it or causing the storm to make little hailstones instead of big ones and thus having much less destruction. Hail causes many millions of dollars worth of damage every year in the United States and almost any effort to reduce the losses seems to be justified.
Scientists believe that hailstones are very small in the beginning but grow in size as they go up and down several times in the thunderstorm clouds. Even in hot weather, it is very cold in the top layers of one of these great clouds. Raindrops freeze and in falling gather more water or snow in these high regions. Soon they are caught in rising air currents and carried up into freezing temperatures again. On each trip up and down, another layer of water or snow gathers on the outside and is frozen. At last the multi-layered stones become so heavy that they fall to the ground, in spite of rising currents, and as they leave the cloud they come down with great rapidity and may beat crops to the ground, batter automobiles, break glass and bruise and sometimes kill livestock. A hailstone the size of a baseball falling many thousands of feet is a very dangerous thing.
For many years after the hail-shooting experiments, it was thought that nothing could be done about it except to carryhail insurance. Then, shortly after World War II, scientists of the General Electric Company announced that they had conducted some successful experiments in controlling the weather and this led to efforts to control rainfall, prevent hail, and stop hurricanes.
The man who started this new effort at weather control was Vincent Schaefer. He observed the weather on top of Mt. Washington, in New Hampshire, a place where it is very cold and windy in winter. The observatory is fastened to the solid rock of the mountain top by steel cables, to keep it from being blown off. Vast quantities of ice accumulate on the building. Snow comes down in great quantities at times but is generally carried by high winds which have reached terrific speed, on one occasion going up to 231 miles an hour. Conditions there are in some respects like the weather in the top of a big thunderstorm.
One of the peculiar things that happens up there on Mt. Washington and in the top of a thunderstorm is the formation of liquid water droplets, which are colder than freezing but they do not turn to ice. These droplets are said to be supercooled. Schaefer found in his experiments at General Electric that a small pellet of dry ice, the size of a pea, when dropped into air containing a cloud of supercooled water droplets could produce untold billions of small ice nuclei. So he carried some dry ice up in an airplane and dropped it into the top of a cloud with supercooled water droplets, and a trail of snow was seen falling from the bottom of the cloud. Many others tried the same experiment and some had similar results. The snow turned to rain as it came down to warmer levels, and the process was called “rainmaking.”
There is one disturbing fact. Before dry ice will work on a cloud, it must be very near the point of making rain without any outside help. But many of the rainmakers believe that dry ice makes more rain fall or causes it to fall sooner thanit would otherwise. Thus, as the cloud moves along, the rainmaker may be able to cause a shower in a certain place, whereas the cloud might have moved far away before it began to rain. In this story the important point is that some of the experimenters believe that dry ice or some other chemical will cause the rain to fall but will make it much less likely that nature’s process will develop to the point of producing hail.
The news of all this rainmaking in the West aroused intense interest on the part of a young man named Gordon Clouser. He thought he might be able to prevent hail, and if he succeeded, he might stop tornadoes. In the Midwest there is an old story about a farmer who knocked the life out of a tornado by hitting it with a two-by-four. On hearing this story, many people have gotten the idea that the government might destroy a tornado by gunfire. More recently there have been serious proposals that these vicious local storms with funnel clouds and violent winds be destroyed by guided missiles. There is no evidence that any of the plans offered so far would be successful in breaking up hailstorms or tornadoes, but they are extremely small when compared with hurricanes, and the government has received thousands of proposals that these great storms be wiped out or rendered harmless by gunfire.
Behind most of the suggestions for killing hurricanes is the idea that they begin as small whirls in the atmosphere and go through early stages of growth to the size of a tornado or a thunderstorm, and if they could be hit with great force in a vital place while small, they might die out. On this assumption, there have been a great many proposals that the Navy send battleships into the hurricane area to search for incipient hurricanes and fire broadsides into them. No test of this kind has been made for two reasons. The hurricane region is so large that the entire Navy would beinsufficient for such a patrol. On the other hand, there is not a shred of evidence that hurricanes begin as small storms like tornadoes or thunderstorms. Actually, they seem to develop as mildly disturbed weather over an area of thousands of square miles. The experts say that shooting at the weather in such a large region would certainly be futile. After the World War II, the atom bomb stimulated some new ideas and thousands of letters were written to the government about knocking a hurricane out with an atom bomb at the right time and place.
When the New Mexico atom bomb was exploded, the weather was bad, with rain in torrents, strong winds, lightning and thunder. Afterward, the weather was much better and this led to a lot of speculation. The fact is, however, that the scientists waited until the weather improved before they exploded the bomb; hence neither the bad weather nor the improvement could be attributed to the explosion.
Before the tests at Bikini in 1946 and Eniwetok in 1948, the scientists received numerous letters, warning them that the explosions would start storms and might cause a typhoon. But the effects of explosions of this kind are soon over, while the forces that maintain a hurricane or typhoon must be applied continuously day and night for a week or two, to keep one of these big tropical storms going in full fury. One of the scientists who witnessed these tests estimated that it would take a thousand atomic bombs at any moment to equal the energy of motion in a hurricane. No scientist has figured what would happen if one thousand atomic bombs were exploded at one time in a storm area!
After a year or two of rainmaking with dry ice and another chemical, silver iodide, the conviction grew that it would be possible to kill a hurricane by dropping some of this material in a vital spot. Some of the bolder students of weather control actually tried it. One of them was Gordon Clouser.Just what he did when he flew into the storm and what happened to it afterward make a mystery, for he gave his life in the effort. It is a good example of the fearless activities of the hurricane hunters.
Gordon Clouser was born in 1912, in Gibraltar, Pennsylvania. He grew into his teens as an active, good-looking boy with many diverse interests. Quick to learn, he finished high school at fourteen. His family moved to New Mexico, where he worked several years as a surveyor, then took two degrees at the University of New Mexico. After that, he had many activities—teacher, librarian, writer and director of plays. He made a movie, composed music, wrote poetry, was in the Air Corps reserve one year, taught meteorology and aeronautics at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle for a year and a half. He learned to fly in Idaho and then was a teacher in Junior College in Yakima, Washington.
It was 1950 when Gordon became excited about the work that was being done in rainmaking in many parts of the country. By April of the next year, he had moved to Plainview, Texas, and had begun to organize airplane operations to prevent hail on the high plains of the State. Having developed his own secret formula for the chemicals to be dropped into thunderstorm clouds, he experimented in his car, in airplanes and in the home freezer. Once he came home for dinner, carrying some denim to be used in connection with an experiment, and his wife discovered that he had taken all the food out of the freezer so he could drop chemicals in it, to see what might happen in the atmosphere. When he asked what they were having for dinner, she replied, “I guess it will be frozen denim.”
The year 1951 was not an easy one for Clouser. The thought of preventing hail was new to most people and he had some difficulty in getting enough money to finance thenecessary plane operations. He asked farmers for twenty to forty cents an acre for protection from hail and compared this cost with the much higher rates for hail insurance. But, he argued, the prevention of hail would lower the insurance rates, which are based on the frequency of such storms in any area and the amount of damage done.
To prevent hail, Gordon and his pilots flew into and over thunderstorms, to see if they contained hail in dangerous sizes and, if so, they dropped his secret chemicals into the tops of the clouds. This is called “seeding” by the rainmakers. Gordon was sure that he was preventing hail damage from the clouds they seeded. By 1952 he had nine planes at his command. In that year, from June 1 to October 1, they checked 421 thunderstorms and found ice in dangerous sizes in eighty-two of them, which were seeded. He reported to the farmers that there was no appreciable hail damage from any of them and there were no complaints on that score.
During this time he was watching the reports of tornadoes and getting the Weather Bureau’s forecasts and warnings. On May 26, he heard a prediction of tornadoes in an area which included the two counties where he was working to prevent hail. Without regard for the danger of flying among thunderheads in tornado weather, his planes were in the air for a total of nearly ten hours that day, seeding clouds that looked dangerous. That night, a half hour after the last of Gordon’s planes landed, the Weather Bureau issued an “all clear.” There had been no tornadoes in either county. Gordon said, “We can’t prove that we prevented a tornado—maybe none would have formed anyway—but we do know that conditions were right for one, and we changed those conditions.”
For a man of Clouser’s adventurous spirit, this was just a side issue. He occupied much of his spare time studyinghurricanes and making plans for the day when he would be operating a large company to kill these storms before they reached the Coasts of the United States. He hoped to have his main office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with planes stationed also at Pensacola, Florida, on the coast of Mexico, in Cuba, and at two or three other strategic places. He would get the government reports, talk to the weather men, and at the right time drop a mixture containing his secret formula into the eye of the storm or some other vital spot that he would find by flying above the storm clouds and studying the wind circulation.
His wife, Olive, took this philosophically. With their three children, she was living at Norman, near Oklahoma City. Like the wives of most adventurous pilots, she knew that any one of these trips might be her husband’s last. She encouraged him in his hail prevention but worried about tornadoes, and especially hurricanes. She knew that they form and move over vast sea surfaces on which the winds impress violent motions, a deadly place for a man to land when in trouble. After Gordon flew into the tornado clouds in May, he came to Oklahoma City by bus and called her on the phone to come and get him in the car. Instead of going home, he asked her to drive him to the Weather Bureau Office at the airport, where he checked on the reports to see if they knew what had happened to the tornadoes. Then she found out what he had been doing and heard him talking about hurricanes.
Olive had something special on her mind. She wanted to paint the kitchen-yellow, but he was against it. She tried to get a compromise. If he was going to fly into tornadoes and other storms against her advice, why not paint the kitchen yellow, even if he didn’t like it very much? He offered strong objections and she put it off for a while.
In the meantime, Gordon was in trouble. September of that year—1952—was very dry in Texas. The farmers in Floyd and Hale Counties in that state got the idea that his agitations against hail had prevented rain. Anyway, he was out of work, for, as he said, “There is no point in a hail-busting business when there are no clouds.” A delegation of farmers called on him to protest his activities. They said that he and his men had deprived them of rain and they were going to lose a lot of money.
Gordon convinced them that his work on the clouds earlier in the year had nothing to do with the drought. He pointed out that only 82 out of 421 storms had been seeded; therefore, 339 of them had acted exactly as nature had intended. Besides that, he showed them news reports that nearly all of Texas was dry, some parts being much drier than the counties he was working. They went home satisfied, but Gordon had time on his hands, with no thunderheads or clouds to work on. So he gathered data on hurricanes and spent a good deal of time at home, making experiments in the freezer. He wanted to work on big storms. The little ones in Floyd and Hale Counties gave him trouble. All rainmakers know that it is possible to seed a cloud and have rain on the farm or ranch of a man who refuses to pay for seeding, and have no rain on a farm next to it, owned by a man who has paid for the service.
October came and it proved to be the driest month for the country as a whole since weather records began. All the rainmakers were in trouble and the “hail-busters” were out of work. Gordon sat at home, listening to the radio and working on his formula. He and Olive talked about many things but neither mentioned hurricanes or yellow kitchens. Then on Tuesday, October 21, Gordon left for Plainview. The next day he heard a news report from Lubbock thatthere was a hurricane in Cuba, moving toward the United States. On Wednesday he left for Florida in a Luscombe plane, saying nothing to anybody except Bill and Pauline Seirp. Bill was not a pilot but Gordon had been teaching him to fly.
Knowing nothing about the trip to Miami, Olive was having the kitchen painted yellow and wondering what Gordon would say when he came home from Plainview. That was on Thursday. On Sunday, the twenty-sixth, she and the children had a late breakfast but managed to get to Sunday School and remained for church service. During the hymn at the beginning of the service, there was a long-distance call for Olive from Plainview. Gordon was lost at sea. Later in the day, she heard the story in full.
Gordon was not satisfied with the plane. When he reached Florida he tried to get one better suited for storm work. He had plans for building a special plane for the purpose but now he was anxious to get into the hurricane. It might be the last one of the season, he thought. It had done a great deal of damage in Cuba. He went to the Weather Bureau Office in Miami and got the latest information on the position, strength and movement of the storm. At 3:45 P.M. (October 25) the center of the hurricane was about seventy-five or eighty miles east of Miami when Gordon took off in his Luscombe plane. At 8:56 P.M., a radio station in Miami picked up a message from him, saying that he was fifty or sixty miles east-southeast of Miami, still in the edge of the storm. The radio station talked with him for twenty-six minutes as he flew toward Miami, making poor headway against the winds. The last message was, “Out of fuel—descending—give my love to my wife and family.”
The Civil Air Patrol and the ships and planes of the Coast Guard searched the area for forty-eight hours without findingany trace of the missing man. Olive went to Miami and did her best to keep the planes looking for him. Whether or not he had any effect on the storm will never be known for sure. The weather forecasters in Miami did not think so. But the hurricane soon afterward took an erratic course. It was destructive early on the twenty-sixth as it turned into the Bahamas, then lost force, and turned northward. The official report of the Weather Bureau said that “it moved northeastward thereafter as a disturbance of no great violence.”
The uncertainties and the tragedy in this case brought to mind the Savannah storm of 1947, which Gordon may have studied. It began far to the southward, near the Isthmus of Panama, early on the ninth of October. On the eleventh, it crossed the extreme western end of Cuba, and on the twelfth passed over southern Florida. From this time on, its course was very unusual. Reconnaissance planes followed it going northeastward over the Atlantic until the night of the thirteenth, when it was east of Wilmington, North Carolina. Early on the fourteenth, a plane got into the storm area and found it moving southwestward. With considerable force it struck Savannah, Georgia, early on the fifteenth, causing about two million dollars’ worth of damage. Citizens of Savannah and some of the city officials complained to the government for causing the hurricane to strike the city.
At about the time, or just before the hurricane changed its course abruptly to the southwest, military planes had carried out an experiment in dropping dry ice into its upper levels. There was a great deal of discussion in the press. At first it was said that the dry ice had caused the storm to take a new course, but after the Savannah complaints were heard, little more was said by the military about the experiment and it remains something of a mystery. Few scientists believe that dry ice could have such an effect on so large astorm. Actually, there were few observations in the storm area during the night of the thirteenth to fourteenth and precise information about the time and nature of the change of course was not available for an investigation. It belongs in the same class as the Clouser storm.