Stormchasers: The Hurricane Hunters and Their Fateful Flight into Hurricane Janet

Rating:
Summary: Stormchasers
Review: Before satellite weather photos, the main way of getting information on Atlantic and Caribbean hurricanes was to fly airplanes into them. It is still being done, for it is still the best means for getting the exact location of a hurricane and details such as its speed and direction. In the more than half century of countless such patrols, only one aircraft and crew have been lost. Their story is told in _Stormchasers: The Hurricane Hunters and Their Fateful Flight into Hurricane Janet_ (Norton) by David Toomey. Toomey has gone back to look at Navy documents, interviewed members of the former Weather Reconnaissance Squadron to which the flight belonged, and talked with members of the crew's families. The book has a framework of a reconstruction of the mission of the September 1955 flight, and does so with as much detail as could possibly be gathered so many years on. The story might in itself be a little thin, but Toomey has as well given a broader picture of the history of hurricane science and general meteorology.

Reports of hurricanes at sea began to become practical after ships got radios; the first wireless report of a hurricane was in 1909. The program of reporting storms was a victim of its own success; ships' captains so well knew the danger of hurricanes that one report would send all ships steaming away from the source, making further data collection impossible. No one seriously proposed flying an airplane into a hurricane, because no one knew what such a flying environment would be like. The first flight into a hurricane was performed on a bet, in 1943, and afterwards other pilots wanted to try, and meteorological data started being taken. By 1955, the Weather Bureau, Navy, and Air Force had been sending official flights into massive storms for about a decade. The mission led by Navy Lieutenant Commander Grover B. Windham into the dangers of Hurricane Janet in the Caribbean took place in a PV2 Neptune, which looked a little like the legendary B-17, and could take a similar amount of punishment. Toomey has recreated the flight from its beginning, out of the base at Guantanamo. He can only speculate about its end; there was a final transmission from the plane, "Beginning penetration," which meant they were entering the storm. No trace of the plane or crew was ever found, and Toomey has written three possible fatal outcomes.

The details of the flight itself are well presented (and may well remind readers of The Perfect Storm), but the digressions into the important history of meteorology are fascinating. We are invited to admire that genius of amateur science, Benjamin Franklin, who noted in 1743 that a storm seemed to have tracked from Philadelphia to Boston, and who was the first to speculate that such storms travel along the country but contain winds different from their overall direction of movement. There were attempts in the last century to track a hurricane by seismograph. The reduced pressure would lift up the Earth's crust of the ocean floor, and there was some success in triangulating earthquake-type shifts detected at different stations. We no longer call hurricanes exclusively by women's names, but even in 1955, the practice was not uncontroversial. Forecasters excused themselves by saying that "like women, every hurricane is different, they are generally unpredictable, and they can make men feel small and inconsequential." Besides, no flier wanted to declare that he had "penetrated Charlie;" but in 1979, men's names started being used as well. _Stormchasers_ nicely contrasts chapters recounting the sad fate of the fliers into hurricane Janet with chapters containing an often inspiring story of scientific enquiry.

Rating:
Summary: Weather Tragedy and History
Review: Before satellite weather photos, the main way of getting information on Atlantic and Caribbean hurricanes was to fly airplanes into them. It is still being done, for it is still the best means for getting the exact location of a hurricane and details such as its speed and direction. In the more than half century of countless such patrols, only one aircraft and crew have been lost. Their story is told in _Stormchasers: The Hurricane Hunters and Their Fateful Flight into Hurricane Janet_ (Norton) by David Toomey. Toomey has gone back to look at Navy documents, interviewed members of the former Weather Reconnaissance Squadron to which the flight belonged, and talked with members of the crew's families. The book has a framework of a reconstruction of the mission of the September 1955 flight, and does so with as much detail as could possibly be gathered so many years on. The story might in itself be a little thin, but Toomey has as well given a broader picture of the history of hurricane science and general meteorology.

Reports of hurricanes at sea began to become practical after ships got radios; the first wireless report of a hurricane was in 1909. The program of reporting storms was a victim of its own success; ships' captains so well knew the danger of hurricanes that one report would send all ships steaming away from the source, making further data collection impossible. No one seriously proposed flying an airplane into a hurricane, because no one knew what such a flying environment would be like. The first flight into a hurricane was performed on a bet, in 1943, and afterwards other pilots wanted to try, and meteorological data started being taken. By 1955, the Weather Bureau, Navy, and Air Force had been sending official flights into massive storms for about a decade. The mission led by Navy Lieutenant Commander Grover B. Windham into the dangers of Hurricane Janet in the Caribbean took place in a PV2 Neptune, which looked a little like the legendary B-17, and could take a similar amount of punishment. Toomey has recreated the flight from its beginning, out of the base at Guantanamo. He can only speculate about its end; there was a final transmission from the plane, "Beginning penetration," which meant they were entering the storm. No trace of the plane or crew was ever found, and Toomey has written three possible fatal outcomes.

The details of the flight itself are well presented (and may well remind readers of The Perfect Storm), but the digressions into the important history of meteorology are fascinating. We are invited to admire that genius of amateur science, Benjamin Franklin, who noted in 1743 that a storm seemed to have tracked from Philadelphia to Boston, and who was the first to speculate that such storms travel along the country but contain winds different from their overall direction of movement. There were attempts in the last century to track a hurricane by seismograph. The reduced pressure would lift up the Earth's crust of the ocean floor, and there was some success in triangulating earthquake-type shifts detected at different stations. We no longer call hurricanes exclusively by women's names, but even in 1955, the practice was not uncontroversial. Forecasters excused themselves by saying that "like women, every hurricane is different, they are generally unpredictable, and they can make men feel small and inconsequential." Besides, no flier wanted to declare that he had "penetrated Charlie;" but in 1979, men's names started being used as well. _Stormchasers_ nicely contrasts chapters recounting the sad fate of the fliers into hurricane Janet with chapters containing an often inspiring story of scientific enquiry.

Rating:
Summary: In the face of daunting odds and tremendous danger....
Review: David Toomey's well researched book has an astounding wealth of information that is both stunning in detail and fascinating in every aspect. This book drew my attention because of my own obsession with hurricanes, having been through several in North Carolina,(to include Fran, Bonnie,and Floyd ). During Floyd we were in the eye of the storm at night and went out and looked up into a clear, silent sky and watched as suddenly a hurricane hunter flew overhead, the only sound at all.
David Toomey details the thoughts that went into the changing views of weatheras a philosophy and the evolution into the science of meteorology. This transformation from philosophy to science is interesting. Weather phenomena was thought to be only a local event and the idea that weather traveled from one area to another was not even imagined. The idea of weather patterns was a foreign concept as well. Toomey details this transformation which spans the continents, including battles of very differing ideas. The leap in the quantity of scientific data and reliability of it's use from the the 1950's to present time is amazing.
This scientific evolution was also a big push in the development of computers, originally called a "calculating clock"(in 1623), then "stepped reckoner" (1673), and then a giant leap to the "Difference Engine" in the 1830's. This subject in and of itself would have been a great subject.
Throughout all of this history of meteorology, the key aspect of this book centers on the people that flew into the hurricanes to obtain the data that would revolutionize hurricane forecasting. Their lives are opened and the picture that is viewed is of normal, everyday men. They saw their mission in life and pursued it, even in the face of daunting odds and tremendous danger. David Toomey has written a book that covers the world of hurricanes from the science to the very human and intimate aspects that surround them and has done so in a way that both educates and captivates your attention.

Rating:
Summary: "Stormchaser" needs a "Wordchaser"
Review: For anyone who has ever been fascinated by airplanes, by meteorology, by weird and anomalous weather, "Stormchasers" is an excellent read. And for anyone who has ever been fascinated by weird and anomalous proofreading, it's even better. It all began to unravel on page 49 when I was told of the airplane "hangers" being constructed in Jacksonville. My first image was of gigantic wire objects on which airframes were hung to keep from wrinkling. When the word appeared again a few pages later, I finally checked my dictionary, aware that words sometimes become part of the language through years of misuse. Such was not the case. Apparently the proofreader figured this out after a while too, for as the book moved forward, "hangers" transmogrified into "hangars" and all was well. Except, later, in reference to the hurricane hunters, I was told that no one's interest had been "peaked." And all the time I kept saying to myself, "poor David Toomey." Here's a man whose powers of research and attention to detail seem inexhaustible, whose ability to reconstruct the events of that day (as well as the hundreds of years of storm study that preceded it) are beyond dispute, but whose reputation is ambushed at every turn by sloppy proofreading.

The book, in the end, is excellent, both dramatically and scientifically. We gain an intimate knowledge of the plane's crew while being schooled in the history of modern (and sometimes ancient) meteorology. Best of all, Toomey clearly delineates life inside a P2V Neptune flying through the wall and eye of an Atlantic hurricane; and even though the title divulges the ending, it does not diminish the tension or suspense. I have been a weather "fan" all my life, but I found it humbling to learn just how little I actually know about the atmosphere. This a five-star book in every area but one, and that one is hardly the author's fault. Even though this may not be a cliffHANGER, "Stormchasers" will PIQUE your interest from the start.

Rating:
Summary: Final Mission
Review: In late September 1955, a tropical depression in the Caribbean became the 10th hurricane of the season--Janet. The Naval Air Station in Jacksonville followed standard procedure, sending out hurricane hunters from Gauantanamo Bay, Cuba, on what should have been a routine reconnaisance mission. But Lt. Cmdr. Grover Windham and his crew of eight never returned from their flight into the eye of the storm. What happened?

Toomey recounts the possible scenarios as he reconsiders the drama, but he also uses the tragedy to discuss the relatively
primitive state of weather prediction at the time.

There was no Doppler radar, no satellite imaging, no global-positioning systems. The twin-engine Neptune plane was outfitted witht he cutting-edge technology of the day---butu meterologists used pencil and paper to make graphs, and pilots still looked at the waves below to estimate their position.

Crew Five really didn't know what it would find with Hurricane Janet. It's final radio transmission at 8:30 a.m. ended, "Beginning penetration."

Rating:
Summary: Stormchasers
Review: This glimpse into 1940's and 50's Navy airmen's exploration of hurricanes is fascinating reading, from a scientific and a human perspective. I've never read nonfiction that captured my imagination and attention so well. It's amazing to me that this story hadn't been told before. How did we come this far into the space age without knowing that people have been flying into hurricanes to study them since the 1940's? And why did those particular people believe they could, without sophisticated instruments, fly into hurricanes and come out again? This book provides suspense while informing the reader of historic events surrounding the world of weather forecasting. I look forward to reading what David Toomey writes next.