On 15 October 1950, a hurricane suddenly appeared on the weather charts of the Hurricane Warning Center in Miami. The storm was unusual in that there had been no warning of its formation, no “easterly wave” in the pattern of isobars well out in the south central Atlantic, no area of squalls and variable winds that anyone had noticed. It was just there, well developed and close in, slightly southwest of Jamaica and only about 500 miles from Miami.
That night, moving northeast at about eight knots, the hurricane grazed the west tip of Jamaica, flattening villages and crops and drowning several people. On 16 October, it smashed across central Cuba, cutting power lines and flooding roads. The city of Camaguey was isolated for about three hours, and winds in the streets on the fringe of the storm were clocked at 70 miles an hour. By the next morning, winds near the hurricane’s eye were recorded at more than 100 miles an hour. The hurricane headed north at 11 to 13 knots, and the Hurricane Warning Service predicted it would pass well to the east of Florida and ordered precautions for the Bahamas.
At Naval Air Station Miami on 17 October, the “Hurricane Hunters” of Patrol Squadron 23 (PatRon 23) prepared their PB4Y-2S Privateers for another hurricane reconnaissance mission, shortened in Navy/weather jargon to “hurrecco.” During such an assignment, the pilots flew their Privateers to locate, track, penetrate, circumnavigate, and measure the big storms that roared in from the southern seas. The big bomber normally flew the first few hours through clear skies, but when the pilot sighted the dark cloud mass of the storm, he would drop down close to the surface and begin a low-level penetration of the eye. Low level means 300 to 700 feet—whatever it takes to stay under the lowest cloud deck.
At such altitudes, updrafts have not yet acquired momentum, and downdrafts have mostly mushroomed out— but that did not mean that at 300 feet the Privateer got a free ride to the eye. The rain was so dense that its sustained drumming on the aluminum skin of the airplane made communication between crew members impossible except on the intercom; it was so solid that it pushed in around windows, gun turrets, and rivets and dropped warmly into the laps of the pilots, wetting controls, charts, and instruments; it was so heavy that cylinder head temperatures approached their minimum danger points, threatening engine failure. There also was wind down there, more than 100 knots of it. The cruising airspeed of the Privateer was less than 150 knots. With the wind direction just forward of the port wing (as it had to be to enter the eye), the airplane was going a lot slower over the surface of the earth than its indicated 150 knots, and a lot of that motion was sideways. And the hurricane kept trying to pick up that upwind wing and force the other one down. With the Privateer’s wingspan of 110 feet and 50-foot seas reaching up from below, there was not much margin for error on a low-level penetration.
Often in low-level penetrations, both pilots fought the controls, backed up by the autopilot turned to low sensitivity. They brought up the revolutions-per-minute (RPM) of the propellers to keep the engine temperatures out of the red, wiped their rain-wet hands on their flight suits, tightened down their harnesses, and muscled the big plane through until suddenly they broke out into the moving barrel of the eye. There, the Privateers climbed inside the wall of clouds. The navigator determined and checked his position, and the radioman reported that position and the velocity and radius of the hurricane force winds back to base. Then for about 20 minutes, the crew slacked seat belts and harnesses, mopped up rainwater, checked gas sight gauges, poured coffee, and lit cigarettes—until the word sounded across the intercom: “Pilot to crew, standby for the run out.” And then the Privateer plunged back into the dark wall of clouds—the hammering rain, the narrow, wind-torn world between cloud bottoms and wave tops. The pilots kept the wind just aft of the starboard wing, and its 100-mile-an-hour force blew the Privateer out of the storm in a section of an expanding spiral. The mn out was much faster and easier than the approach.
Whenever a hurricane was in range—the Privateer could recon a storm 1,000 miles from base—PatRon 23 crews flew such missions twice a day. At night, Air Force planes took over to track the storm with radar. With three positions a day on their charts and a knowledge of the storm’s dimensions and wind velocities, the meteorologists at the Hurricane Warning Center derived the course and speed of the hurricane—predicted with reasonable accuracy if, when, and where it would come ashore—and warned the populations concerned. The system worked. Before aerial reconnaissance, 400 human lives were lost for every $10 million of hurricane-caused property damage. By 1950 that number was reduced to three.
On 17 October, the afternoon hurrecco took off in gusty 30-knot winds under a low overcast of fast-moving scud. At 1500, the PatRon 23 crew found the storm’s eye 135 miles southeast of the air station. Winds in the wall cloud were 115 miles per hour. At that point, Commander Lewis D. Tamny, Commanding Officer of PatRon 23, had a decision to make. Standing orders and common sense called for the removal of aircraft from any field threatened by hurricane-force winds. But Commander Tamny disliked the idea of moving his aircraft away from the action. His mission, as he saw it, was to track the storm, named “Hurricane Charlie,” and pinpoint its location twice a day; the closer he was to the storm, the more efficiently he could do his job.
On a wall chart in his office, Commander Tamny plotted and analyzed all available data on the storm. He was in almost continual contact with the forecasters at the Warning Center a few miles to the south. He correlated all the data he could get—and then decided to keep his Privateers where they were. The storm, he told his pilots, would graze but not hit Miami. Planes and crews were assigned to fly it again the next day. Some of the pilots disagreed with the decision. Lieutenant Commander John Baker, the operations officer, suggested a move to Naval Air Station Jacksonville 300 miles north. From there, he insisted, the storm could be tracked as easily as from Miami, especially as it was moving in that direction. Lieutenant Ralph Bishop, the flight officer, pointed out that standing orders called for an evacuation to Pensacola but permitted leaving a plane or two in the safety of the big hangar in Miami, ready to fly the storm again when the danger had passed. But Commander Tamny would not budge. The storm would not hit Miami. The planes and pilots would stay and do their jobs.
During the afternoon and evening of 17 October, the winds increased steadily; the clouds lowered and thickened; the palms around the field rattled and bowed their heads. The air became wet and thick and noticeably cooler. Loose objects around the station rolled or tumbled downwind. Tie-downs on the Privateers were doubled and the steel hangar doors rolled closed. By 1800, the sky was dark; the wind rose to 60 knots; and it began to rain. A delegation of officers appealed to their commander, arguing that they could still take off with 60 knots of wind, clear the aircraft out of harm’s way, and fly the hurrecco out of Jacksonville the following day. But Commander Tamny was firm in his decision.
When the wind velocity topped 70 knots, takeoff was no longer safe. Commander Tamny ordered each Privateer manned by one pilot and an aviation machinist’s mate. The skeleton crews removed the tie-downs, started the engines, and kept the planes headed into the building wind. In the dark and the roaring gale, each crew had a tough job keeping their plane’s nose into the wind without brushing wing tips with a neighbor. The grounded pilots rolled in full-down elevator trim and rode the brakes and throttles, comforted by the knowledge that if their planes could fly safely at 250 knots, they certainly could survive winds of half that force on the ground—as long as the wind was on the nose.
For three more hours, the wind continued to increase. At first it blew out of the northeast, but it backed slowly around to north. The tower reported velocities of 100 miles an hour, then 105—and then the tower went off the air and the station went black as a line blew down and the power failed. The Privateers jolted and shook under the wind and rang under the pounding of horizontal blasts of rain. Despite the down elevators, the long Davis wings flapped and tried to lift. The crews were scheduled to be relieved at midnight, but by then no man could walk or even crawl in the vicinity of the beleaguered aircraft. Unbeknownst to the pilots and mechs, the wind velocity at midnight reached 125 miles an hour.
Suddenly the wind eerily went dead. The relief crews—many of whom had left their frightened families in darkened, half-flooded homes and driven to the station across sparking fallen wires and debris-filled streets—ran out to relieve the watch, circling the idling props and ducking up through the bomb bays to the flight decks. The tired and soaked airmen of the first watch dropped down and ran for shelter. All hands at PatRon 23 knew what was coming. The storm was not over; they were in the eye. When the terrible winds returned, they would be from the opposite direction—from behind the yet undamaged Privateers—and unless the planes could be turned completely around, they would be torn apart by the returning gale.
The relief pilots plied brakes and throttles to get around, but they could not turn in place: The aircraft were parked too close and had to spread out to make the turn. There was not enough time. Only the end aircraft moved away and turned toward the south before Hurricane Charlie struck again. For the men in the other Privateers—and for Commander Tamny, sweating under emergency lighting as his office trembled under his feet—the next hours were truly tragic.
In the first few minutes, wind velocity on the flight line rose to a screaming 120-plus, from dead astern. The pilots locked the controls, but the locks quickly snapped. The Privateers’ huge rudders slammed hard over to one side, ripped from their hinges, and careened into wings and flaps before disappearing in the darkness. It was the same with elevators, with flaps, with ailerons. The pilots abandoned their positions to avoid flailing rudder pedals and control columns. They shut down the engines to save the spinning props from damage by flying control surfaces, and they set the brakes—which held. The planes did not move. Piece by piece, however, they came apart under the pounding of the storm.
At about 0200 on 18 October, the wind began to drop, and PatRon 23’s engineering officer, Lieutenant Bill Yeaw—driven to incaution by the painful awareness of what was happening to his beloved aircraft—ventured out onto the ramp to verify the damage. He took about six steps, leaning backward into the gale, when a gust lifted him bodily, hurled him several yards, rolled him ignomin- iously along the concrete under the props, and finally deposited him with a bone-crunching thud against a tire. He struggled up into that plane and waited out the storm.
The storm ended by 0400, but the men of PatRon 23 did not realize the degree of damage until daylight. Officers and sailors and a few wives straggled out on to the field and looked around in disbelief. The once proud line of Privateers stood in awful disarray. All but the two on either end stood completely stripped, with jagged metal and torn hinges dangling from open gashes on wings and tail. Strewn parts, flaps, ailerons, rudders, and elevators littered the area. Of the squadron’s nine Privateers, two were flyable that morning. One was secure in the hangar for an engine change; another was on hurricane alert at Ramey Air Force Base on the west end of Puerto Rico.
Commander Tamny stood solemnly with feet apart and arms crossed, surveying the devastation and the end of his professional career. One of the wives put her hand on his arm and said simply, “Captain, I’m so sorry.”
The commander of the Hurricane Hunters looked down at her. He was not totally defeated. He managed a rueful grin and spread his big arms wide to take in the whole disastrous scene. “Who else,” he asked rhetorically, “could have done it like this?”