On that critical morning, Colonel F. B. Wood, a veteran flyer in the Air Corps, came down to Bolling Field outside Washington with hurricane-probing on his mind. After talking about it to the men around the field, he decided to try a flight at least into the outer edges of the storm as it passed to the eastward during the day. He thought about the junior officers and men being sent into these furious winds and he felt it was a good idea for one of the head men to go out and see what it was like. Wood talked to Lieutenant Frank Record and found he was anxious to go. He grabbed the telephone and got Major Harry Wexler on the line. Harry was a Weather Bureau research official who was in the Army for the duration. “Harry, how about taking you out in the hurricane today?” Wood asked. “I’ll pilot the plane. Frank is going along.” “Sure you can take me out, but you’ve got to bring me back,” Harry answered. “This is a round trip, Floyd, I hope.” Wood agreed to do his best to make a round trip out of it. At two o’clock that afternoon, the trio took off and headed east with some misgivings. They knew that this was one of the worst tropical storms that had been charted up to that time. The hurricane was then centered near Cape Henry, Virginia. The wind at Norfolk had been up to ninety miles an hour. Colonel Wood described it as follows: “Immediately after take-off, we penetrated a thin overcast, the top of which was about fifteen hundred feet, and then proceeded to a point approximately twenty miles northeast of Langley Field. The boundary of the hurricane, as seen from the latter location, was a dense black wall running along the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay. The airplane was turned on a heading so as to fly a track that would lead straight toward the estimated position of the center of the hurricane. Altitude was three thousand feet. A drift correction of 30° was allowed to account for the estimated one hundred miles per hour cross wind encountered at the outer edge of the storm. Immediately on entering the outer edge, the atmosphere turned very dark and a blanket of heavy rainfall was encountered.” Very surprisingly, the flyers reported that in this area a strong but steady down-current was also encountered. The latter was contrary to the accepted idea that all of the area encompassed by the steep pressure fall in a hurricane contains ascending rather than descending air up to great heights. Although visibility was very low, due to the heavy rainfall, there were very few clouds below the altitude of the airplane (three thousand feet), except for some scud over Cape Henry.