Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [88]
The weather data these flights provided were useful, so useful that when the war ended, the military kept up its mission of weather reconnaissance flights. The most important squadrons were 57th Weather Recon based at Hicken Air Force Base in Hawaii, and the 53rd Weather Recon of the Air Force Reserve in Biloxi, Mississippi. The 53rd still exists, now part of the 403rd Wing, based at Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi; they're called the Hurricane Hunters, and use ten Lockheed-Martin WC-130 aircraft. Other squadrons flew missions at Guam, Alaska, and Bermuda.
In the 1950s, Max (Maximillian C.) Kozak was chief warrant officer for the 57th. He was also a meteorologist, and after he left the Air Force found a home at the weather station at the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia. His first time into a hurricane, as he recalls it, was a mission that ended at Johnson Island in the summer of 1955, through the eye of Hurricane Dot. He was the weatherman part of the crew of ten, stationed in the back of the B-29 bomber of wartime vintage, then the weather platform of choice, with his instrumentation and his single dropsonde. The briefing was to supplement whatever the ground stations already knew, to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of upper air storm data.
"Our mission was to fly daily," he recalls, "on general reconnaissance missions, mostly descending from 18,000 feet to identify surface craft in the area." Hurricane reporting was a sideline. Dot was their opportunity.
"Our crew was scheduled for takeoff at midnight. Dot was just off the big island of Hawaii. Light rain was falling as we took off and climbed to 18,280 feet. The idea was to 'box' the storm, collecting data from its periphery outside the 50-mile-an-hour wind band, and to penetrate the storm—meaning penetrate the wall cloud into the eye—at sunrise. The first go-around was no problem, but on the second go-around the navigator spotted something on the radar. He called me over. I got out of my seat and saw a saberlike line of activity moving with the winds northward. I knew what it was.
"I said to the pilot, 'Can we go around this?'
"But the tail of the anomaly extended eastward, around 50 miles or so, so the pilot said, 'No way. There are rocks in those clouds.' We'd be over land. The rocks were the mountains on Big Island.
"But I knew what we were heading for, so I said, brace up, we're going to hit a down draft. Everyone strapped in, and we just waited. For ten minutes we flew horizontally, normally. Then, sure enough, down we dropped, suddenly, a thousand, three thousand feet in just seconds . . . I thought for sure the wings had been pulled off and looked out the window to see . . . and there they still were. As I looked, I saw a sort of undulation upward. Somehow, we got a boost of wind from below and climbed out."
Max recalls that the second navigator, a hurricane virgin, didn't take the drop so well. "He began to shout and yell, and as we called it 'fell out of the tree.' We had to subdue him, so we tied him up and put him under the navigation table where he fell asleep."
The flight continued to box the storm as it moved steadily northwestward. No one made notes. They couldn't. The turbulence was too severe. No more heart-stopping thousand-foot drops, no more freaking fits for the second navigator, but the plane was shaking like an old man with the ague and it was impossible to do more than cling to the nearest stanchion and just watch