In other ways the unexpected can be serious. One experience is cited by Captain Ed Vrable, who was navigator on a flight into a hurricane in 1953. After a careful approach, the aircraft suddenly popped into the eye, but it was only about eight miles in diameter. It was not easy to circle a superfortress in this small eye. At one point, the turning arc was a little too broad and the aircraft edged out into the winds on the border. It was instantly tossed back into the eye, almost upside down, and he had the worst fright of his career in the reconnaissance business. But the pilots made a skillful descent until they managed to get the plane into the correct attitude and finished the flight. In Hurricane Edna, in 1954, a crew of hunters in a WB-29, in command of Captain Charles C. Whitney, had an unexpected duty. They had spent part of the morning and the afternoon of September 14 in the eye of the hurricane. They flew in tight little circles, dodging the wing-shuddering winds on the periphery. Because the Weather Bureau forecasters were afraid of a repetition of a sudden speed-up like that of Hurricane Carol two weeks before, they had asked for a continuous watch. Captain Whitney and his crew were in there for nine hours. And then, with gas getting low, they ran into the unexpected. Some eleven hours after take-off from Bermuda, the aircraft picked up a radio message that the Nantucket lightship, torn from her moorings by terrific winds, was adrift and at Edna’s mercy. The WB-29 plunged into 145-mile-an-hour winds in search of the vessel. Picking up the lightship by radar, the weather plane shepherded the hopelessly lost ship, remaining overhead until a Coast Guard rescue plane arrived. Waves seventy feet high seemed to toss the stricken vessel into the air to meet the low-flying aircraft pressed down by Edna’s raging winds. It felt, the crew said later, as if the plane were dancing on her tail. With the arrival of the relief plane, the WB-29 turned landward. After sixteen hours in the air, and with the gas gauge hitting the low side of the dial, the weather plane made a landing at Dover, Delaware. According to the Air Force, “This flight was one of the most dramatic missions in peacetime Air Force history.” _15._ FIGHTING HAIL AND HURRICANES “_I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain And laugh as I pass in thunder._” —Hebert At first thought, most people would say that fighting hail has nothing to do with hunting hurricanes, but in one instance it did. It is an interesting story which shows how men will take risks in trying to control the weather. The story ends with one man giving up his life in a sensational adventure with a mysterious conclusion.