Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [89]
"Finally, and almost instantly, we just popped out into the eye, into the most beautiful sight. It reminded me of the Vatican, the semicircle of marble columns around the plaza before St. Peter's, but these columns extended all the way around, 360 degrees, and the convection currents had pushed them 50,000 feet into the sky. It was exquisite. The columns, the updrafts that came with the surrounding thunderstorm activity, formed a perfect circle. Winds were minimal in the eye, almost nonexistent. I remember sunlight coming in across the eye. Sometimes eyes are covered with layered cloud, but not with Dot. You could look straight down from the airplane to the ocean, 18,000 feet below. We could see the churning, the white caps on the sea."
Over the centuries, many have seen the eye of a hurricane and survived to tell of it, though generally from the bottom looking up. Sailors have reported stars at night, pristine blue skies by day. The air is reported to be luminous, with an unearthly gleam, with colors in a demented palette of lurid blues tinged with violet and somber greens. Winds can be utterly calm—unlike the water, which is churned by the surrounding and conflicting winds into raging and directionless mountains. Not all storms have eyes. Some that do are shaped like massive replicas of the old Roman Coliseum, sloping in from the top, perfectly round, as though they were forming seating for the gods, waiting for a gladiatorial combat of giants to begin below.
The sound in the eye is deep and ominous, like a freight train passing inches overhead, numbing the brain.
Max and his fellows kept their course, banked left. "We had to locate the center so we drew a line across, I watched the radar altimeter and marked the location of the lowest pressure, then cut back along a left turn. There was not much wind, only a slight descending motion. We measured our drift with a drift meter, our best way then of measuring wind speeds. As we made a ninety-degree turn, we released the dropsonde."
The adventure of Dot wasn't quite over. "We completed the mission and headed home. On the radio we heard that we couldn't land because there was a foot of water on the runway in Hawaii. The nearest alternate runway was Johnson Island, roughly 1,200 miles southwest from where we were. The navigator took a look at the distance, the course, and the fuel reserves, and said to me, 'We need some winds, to get us home.' I took the last maps I had, which were six hours old, and tried to put together a picture of what the wind pattern would be. I gave my winds to the navigator, and he sent them to the engineer. His job was to take my wind and convert it into 'fuel.' According to my calculations, we would be able to see Johnson Island just about the time the tanks emptied. On his own, the pilot decided to descend to see if he could find more favorable winds near the surface. We went down, to no more than two thousand or three thousand feet, and flew at this altitude for several hours.
"As I had predicted, just as we saw the lights on Johnson Island, the engineer announced that we were empty We couldn't go around into the wind—no time. The pilot took a downwind leg and landed the plane, then reversed all four engines. We skidded the length of the runway."
After the plane stopped and the crew got out, Max took a look at the wings. Rivets had popped out all down their length.
Max penetrated six hurricanes in his time with the Air Force, between 1953 and 1958. Of all his reconnaissance flights, the most disturbing wind he experienced was not natural but manmade—he and his crew were assigned to fly into the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Why would they do this? "To see what it is like in there . . ." This was the 1950s. Radiation was known, but its larcenous carcinogenic qualities were not appreciated—scientists still regularly stood unprotected in the Nevada desert to watch the mushrooms ascending into the sky.
Max won't talk about the specifics of the mission—it was classified then, and still is. What