Much of this fascinating work is done by the Air Weather Service of the Air Force on routine daily flights, whether or not there is a tropical storm to be studied. As an example, they have made daily flights from Alaska to the North Pole and back, to keep tabs on the strange weather up there. In this way, there—and in other parts of the world—they get weather daily from places on land and sea where there are no weather stations, no merchant ships to report, and no people to act as weather observers. These flights are named after some bird common to the region. The North Pole flight is called “Ptarmigan”; others are called “Vulture,” “Gull,” etc. Special flights into tropical storms in the Atlantic and Caribbean are called “Duck” missions. Some of these improvements in the hurricane-hunting methods of the Air Weather Service were mentioned in a report by Robert Simpson, a Weather Bureau meteorologist, who flew with the Air Force into “Hurricane George” in 1947. This was a big storm which appeared first over the ocean to the eastward of the Lesser Antilles. The squadron assigned to the job had been moved to Kindley Field, at Bermuda. Simpson saw Lieutenant Colonel Robert David, who was in command, and arranged for the flight in one of the new planes piloted by an experienced officer, Lieutenant Mack Eastburn. Hurricane George, so-called by the Air Force boys, although such names were not then official, moved slowly and menacingly across the Atlantic, north of Puerto Rico, and headed toward Florida. Simpson was in it several times with the Air Force. On the first flight, they were in an old B-29 which had too many hours on the engines and had been a bad actor on previous missions, but this time it behaved like a lady and they picked up a great deal of useful information. On the next trip they had a new plane. Here is a part of Simpson’s story: “Success is a marvelous stimulant. While we had every right to be near exhaustion after our thirteen trying hours this first day in ‘Hurricane George,’ we did not get to bed early that night. There was too much to tell, and too much to discuss concerning the flight scheduled to leave early the next morning. This second flight promised to be even more lucrative of results than the first, for we were scheduled to fly in the newest plane in the squadron. It had only 100 hours or so in the air and contained many new features the other planes didn’t have. Moreover it had bomb bay tanks and could leave the ground with nearly eight thousand five hundred gallons of gasoline.