Inside a Thunderstorm

Most airmen steer clear of thunderclouds. Inside, there's apt to be a rough-house laced with lightning and rattling with hailstones. But sometimes thunderstorms cannot be dodged. So the Air Force, cooperating with the Navy, the Weather Bureau and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, undertook to find the best way to deal with them. If a plane flies too slowly through the vertical gusts, it may lose flying speed and stall. If it flies too fast, the gusts may tear its wings off. This week the Air Force published a chart showing how fast various planes should fly through thunderstorms--if they must.

Getting the information was no airborne picnic. The planes that did the job were tough, night-fighting Black Widows. They "penetrated" 1,600 thunderclouds, often coming out with their noses deep-dented by hail. The worst gust encountered blew at 43 ft. per second (29 m.p.h.) almost directly upward. Said the pilot who flew through it: "The jolt was so severe I thought I had collided with another plane. I was unable to keep my hands on the controls, they banged around so much."

Twenty times the planes were struck by lightning, which temporarily blinded the crew, burned off radio antennas, punched round holes in wingtips and tail surfaces. One pilot described what it felt like: "The radio static kept building in intensity until I couldn't keep the earphone close to my ears. I heard what sounded like the sharp burst of a German 88 millimeter. A sheet of flame enveloped the whole cockpit. Everything looked a bit fuzzy . . . the instruments jumped around so much that I couldn't tell for a moment what was going on. I just let the airplane buck through."

The Air Force does not think that its "Safe Speed Chart" will tempt many pilots to fly into thunderstorms unless they have to.

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