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By Root 352 0

he will say is this: The mission was to take readings inside the stem of the mushroom at 18,000 feet. Max was the radiological officer. "After detonation we went into the stem. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, I saw shades of blacks, reds, pinks, and purples, colors that I never saw, ever again. The temperature was hot in the stem. We flew at 18,000 feet, took our readings, and came out on the other side looking like a flocked Christmas tree. We were 'hot' with radiation, but that wasn't the worst of it. The coral from the ocean floor, close to where the bomb had exploded, had been vaporized, and it crystallized on the plane as we flew through. It was a huge problem, bigger than the radiation. It made the plane too heavy. We were going down. I told the pilot to head for the rainstorm showing on the radar to attempt to wash off the weight of the coral. We did. And we landed safely, thankfully. But that plane was toast. It never flew again."25

One other recon flight flew into a hurricane in the 1950s that had picked up radiation from a nearby nuclear experiment. All that the crew were told afterward was to take a long shower.26

In fact, the danger posed to aircraft through flying into hurricanes is generally not substantial. This is because most of the wind in a hurricane is horizontal, and planes simply become part of the flow, just as they do when they hop a jet stream on their way across the Atlantic. It is the downdrafts that are the problem, and they are much more likely in thunderstorms than in hurricanes. Thunderstorms don't spin. They are an instability in the atmosphere that causes rapid overturning of air, and very rapid ascents and descents. But downdrafts are not unknown in hurricanes, which do spawn both tornadoes and thunderstorms—Max hit a downdraft on the periphery of Dot, and planes have, indeed, been known to drop a thousand feet in a few seconds inside hurricanes, just as Max described. But in thunderstorms such downdrafts are much more common, which is why pilots take a good deal of trouble to avoid such storms when they can. Most experienced travelers can report at least one such downdraft. My own score is two—one over the Congo, when my Zimbabwe-bound plane faced a wall of thunder cells it couldn't evade, and another on a flight to Tel Aviv, during which the coffee wagon and its flight attendant actually hit the ceiling, damaging both and causing panic among the passengers, most of whom (considering the destination) thought for a frightful second that a bomb had gone off.

That downdrafts don't happen very often in hurricanes doesn't detract from the bravery of the early pilots, who really didn't know what to expect, in terms of turbulence, or wind speed, or indeed rainfall.

Chris Fogarty, who has flown into several hurricanes in the Canadian Hurricane Centre's Convair 580 turboprops, says it is mostly experienced as light chop, "like driving a car along a pot-holed road." Hurricane Michael in 2000 was somewhat turbulent along its east side, and Juan, of 2002, pushed the aircraft around a bit. "There were times when my stomach felt it was still a couple of hundred feet below." His worst experience was trying to land in the aftermath of the flight into Tropical Storm Karen, when a low-level wind abruptly blew the plane several hundred feet sideways just above the runway; they had to abort and were diverted to Quebec City, more than six hundred miles away.27

When a U.S. Hurricane Hunter plane flew into Hurricane Hugo in 1989, it too encountered unexpected turbulence. Peter Black, of the National Hurricane Center's research division, recounted that "when we got there the winds were over 200 knots and we just about lost the airplane. It was a really rough ride. An engine caught fire. I have a vivid recollection of seeing the flames shooting by my window. The turbulence was so severe that the fuel regulator had malfunctioned. They were able to douse the fire right away and feather the engine, but that meant we were in the worst part of the storm with only three engines."

Still, it was