Kappler discovered it on September 12, 1945. He was on a regular weather-reporting mission to the Windward Islands. Every day one or more B-25’s took off from Morrison Field at West Palm Beach and explored the atmosphere on flights to Antigua, British West Indies, returning via the open Atlantic to Florida. On that day there was nothing unusual until the plane in which Kappler was flying was about two hours from Antigua. Here, he noted a black wall of clouds to the east and at his suggestion the pilot, First Lieutenant D. A. Cassidy, took the plane down to fifteen hundred feet and they looked around. Without any doubt, a tropical storm was in the making. Its winds already were blowing around a center with gusts at about seventy miles an hour. There was moderate turbulence, with stretches of rain, but they had no particular difficulty in flying through it. They reported it to headquarters and were told to land at Coolidge Field in Antigua and be prepared to take another look and report in the morning. This operation was known as “Duck Fight,” consisting of five B-25 aircraft and five crews made up of twenty officers and fifteen men. This particular group had been at British Guiana but had moved up to Florida in May for the new hurricane duty. It was their job to explore this region twice daily, looking for weather trouble when no storm was known to be in progress. If a suspicious area was found, they were deployed and used in accordance with directives from the hurricane center at Miami. The Navy also had planes assigned to similar missions. After breakfast on the thirteenth Kappler’s crew took off again. About two hours out of Antigua, they encountered winds up to about eighty knots (a little above ninety miles an hour) but flying was smooth. The crew made a few jokes on the general subject of how easy it was to fly through hurricanes. The co-pilot, Lieutenant Hugh Crowe, had the controls. He turned toward the center and the wind picked up to 120 knots. Soon they were in trouble, with severe turbulence and heavy rain. The air speed fluctuated between 160 and 240 miles an hour and cylinder temperatures began to fall rapidly. Crowe fed power to the engines, but the plane began getting out of control. Cassidy had to help him keep the ship level. Kappler shouted that the pressure was dropping rapidly—the pressure altitude was seventeen hundred feet but their actual height was only nine hundred. Crowe said the turbulence was the most severe he had ever experienced. The plane yawed fifteen degrees on either side of the heading. The navigator, Lieutenant Redding W. Bunting, said dryly, “In my opinion a hurricane is not the place in which to fly an airplane.”