In 1947, the Air Forces were assigning B-29’s to their Kindley Base at Bermuda, to replace the B-17’s. The big superforts had room for guests and it soon became common to have somebody hanging around Kindley to get a ride. When a big storm was spotted east of the Windward Islands on the eleventh of September of that year, two newspaper reporters and a photographer from _Life_ Magazine, Francis Miller, were waiting at Bermuda for a hop. The big hurricane became even more violent as it turned toward the southwest and swept across Florida. It was September 14th when Milt Sosin of the Miami _Daily News_ got his “hairy hop” in this same blow. As it crossed the coast, winds of full hurricane force stretched over a distance of 240 miles and the wind reached 155 miles an hour at Hillsboro Light. By this time the hurricane hunters were fully occupied and the riders were left on the ground. Miami communication lines were wiped out and control of the hunters had been shifted to Washington. In charge of a B-17 at Bermuda was Major Hawley. His co-pilot was Captain Dunn, who had learned hurricane hunting in “Kappler’s Hurricane” and other earlier storms. Late on the seventeenth, as the storm roared across Florida with night closing in, Hawley had heard nothing from Washington about his plane going into it, so he gave up and told the riders to come back in the morning. Early the next morning, one of the reporters, a staff writer for the Bermuda _Royal Gazette_, was sitting around in his shorts and thinking about breakfast when Lieutenant Cronin rushed in and said they were ready to take off. The reporter started to get dressed, but Cronin said, “Let’s go. Just as you are. You may drown but you won’t freeze.” They stopped in Hamilton, got the other reporter and the photographer, and found Hawley walking up and down, impatiently waiting for last instructions. So the reporter took a trip of 3,350 miles in his shorts and had a bird’s-eye view of the southern Seaboard, the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico and a bad-acting hurricane. It was a “hairy hop.” They had orders to refuel at Mobile, so they put down at the airfield there, all other planes having been evacuated the day before. An Air Force man came out and asked, “Where you goin’?” They told him and he turned around and shouted, “Some dang fools think they have a kite and can fly through a hurricane.” More men came out and they got gas in the plane. One big fellow said, “You can have your dern trip. But keep the storm away from here.” In twenty minutes they were in the storm. The crew members were bare to the waist, perspiration pouring down, water coming through the panel joints, and everything was wet and shaking. One of the reporters described it this way: