With basic training of the kind that young Duckworth received as a Cadet, he was not fitted to fly into a hurricane or into any sort of really bad weather. Military operations at that time were strictly visual or “contact.” The problem was not how to get through bad weather—thunderstorms, low overcast, fog, for example—but how to keep out of it. There were few flight instruments, and there was no instrument flying training. At that time, dirigibles were thought by many leaders in aeronautics to have the best passenger-carrying possibilities for the future. Steel had just replaced wood in fuselages and airplanes in general had earned the description “heavier-than air.” On the other hand, the world had been electrified by Lindbergh’s flight to Paris in 1927 and other “stunt” flights became numerous. Another thrilling piece of news was Admiral Byrd’s flight to the South Pole in 1929. Trial freight-carrying runs were being flown by the Ford Motor Company from Detroit to Chicago and from Detroit to Buffalo, and Joe heard that a young man could get tri-motor flight time as a co-pilot two days a week, provided he worked four days in the factory. Duckworth headed for Detroit. After getting on the job with Ford, he had his first serious run-in with clear ice, or freezing rain. The plane barely made South Bend Airport, coming in at high speed with a load of ice on the wings. Fifteen years later, the pilot on instruments would have climbed quickly into the warmer air at higher levels and then worked his way down to destination, but instrument flying was unknown at the time. In the spring of 1929, Joe went with the Curtis Wright Flying Service as their first instructor, at Grosse Ile, near Detroit. They were starting out to set up a nation-wide chain of bases with the idea of teaching everyone to fly. The plan was successful at first and in the fall Joe opened a branch at Atlanta, just as the stock market broke wide open. The slump in business that followed in 1930 caused general failure in the flying services. In December, Joe saw that the Atlanta branch was going out of business, and he went to work as a pilot for Eastern Air Transport, now Eastern Airlines, and remained with the company for ten years. At first he flew mail planes with parachutes but no passengers. Even then there was no such thing as flying the weather. On his first mail flight, he got some pointed advice from the operations manager. He told Joe to be “sure to be on the look out for a reflection of the revolving radio beacon on the cloud ceiling and the moment you see such an apparition, you must get down immediately in an emergency field. If you let the overcast close down on you, you are strictly out of luck.” Airplanes were a long way then from being equipped to fly into hurricanes.