At the end of the hurricane season, these flights were reported to the Weather Bureau and recommendations were forwarded to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that military aircraft be used routinely to explore hurricanes and improve the accuracy of the warnings. The Joint Chiefs referred this to their meteorological committee, with representatives of the Army Air Corps, the Navy and the Weather Bureau, and on February 15, 1944, a plan was approved for the coming season. As far as possible, crews with experience in flying the weather were selected. Some of these had been on daily missions on the Atlantic, for the protection of convoys. By the beginning of the 1944 season, planes and men were at their posts in Florida, ready to go on instructions from the joint hurricane center in Miami. Probing of hurricanes by air came to a sharp focus in September, 1944. On the eighth, signs of a disturbance were picked up in the Atlantic, northeast of Puerto Rico. As it approached the northern Bahamas, its central pressure was extremely low, below 27.00 inches—estimated at 26.85—and it covered an enormous area with winds of terrific force. From here its center crossed the extreme eastern tip of North Carolina, sideswiped the New Jersey coast, doing vast damage, and then hit Long Island and New England with tremendous fury. On account of the war, ships at sea were not reporting the weather and the hurricane hunters had a real job on their hands. On the morning of the tenth, Forecaster Norton at the Miami Weather Bureau studied the weather map, grumbled about the lack of observations from the West Indies, and decided to ask for a plane to go out and report the weather north of Puerto Rico. He had little to go on, but he thought it was a very bad storm. On the afternoon of the ninth, the Air Corps had sent a plane out from Antigua. They had reported winds of eighty miles, very rough seas, and center about 250 miles northeast of San Juan. Very little information had come from the area since that time, except the regular weather messages from San Juan. After trying to get the Navy office on the telephone half a dozen times, Norton gave up. Every time he started to dial, the phone rang and he answered it, making an effort to hang up quickly and get a call in before it rang again. But many people had learned about the storm and were anxious for more information, hence the phone was constantly busy. “I thought this was an unlisted phone,” he complained to the map crew. “It is,” replied an assistant. “We gave the number only to the radio, press, and a few others, to make sure we could get a call out when we had to, but these restricted phone numbers leak out. We’ll have to change the number again.”