“Through this fog in which we were traveling at 250 miles an hour there loomed from time to time ghost-like structures rising like huge white marble monuments through the cirrostratus fog. Actually these were shafts of supercooled water which rose vertically and passed out of sight overhead as we viewed them from close at hand. Each time we passed through one of these shafts the leading edge of the wing accumulated an amazing extra coating of rime ice. This kind of icing would have been easy to shake off if the plane had been fitted with standard de-icing equipment. But it was not. We were so close to the center of the storm by the time the icing was discovered that the shafts were too numerous to avoid. “Pilot Eastburn punched me and pointed to the indicated airspeed gage. It stood at 166. ‘At this elevation this plane stalls out at 163,’ Eastburn said, ‘and in this thin air there is no recovery from a stall.’ He continued, ‘We have got to get out of here fast!’ I nodded agreement, feeling a bit sheepish about the whole thing. After all, hadn’t Vincent Schaefer, of General Electric, just a few months earlier demonstrated in the laboratory that water vapor could be cooled to a temperature of -39° before freezing set in? But in the turbulent circulation of a hurricane—this was fantastic! Unbelievable! But there certainly was no guesswork about that six or eight inches of rime ice on the leading edge of the wing! “We got out of there all right, and fast, but we had to do it in a long straight glide; the plane was simply too loaded with ice and too near stall-out to risk the slightest banking action.” After all, the atmosphere is a mixture of gases and it obeys the laws of gases. If the scientists assume that the big storm has a certain structure and a certain circulation of air in its colossal bulk, there are definite conclusions to be drawn concerning the physics of this giant process in the tropical atmosphere. But if it turns out that the assumptions about the structure and circulation are wrong, the conclusions of the physicists may be exactly opposite to the truth. The results of years of study, calculation and discussion seem to be overthrown in one moment as a superfortress plunges into a vital section and the crew sees things that ought not to be there!