Lost To Weather

Interviewer: There were, you mentioned the problems of navigation. There were probably a lot of air craft that were lost. Just flew into the ocean.Well, the weather was horrendous. See, tropical weather is very violent because of very strong thermals and they ... I’m gonna eat up these 15 minutes if we talk ... Interviewer: No that’s fine. No, we’ve got lots of time.Well, the thermals go up so fast. I think clouds build up to something around 40,000 feet, just over thousand, 40,000 feet. Down there, they go up to over 60,000 feet. And inside of some of those big thunder heads, you have winds up to three hundred miles an hour. And the freezing level is somewhere inside the thunder cloud. So you’ve got rain here and ice up here and this flow of air is circling at this high speed. Well, it freezes, comes down here, picks up some more water, goes up there and freezes some more and comes down. So you build up big and bigger pellets till they get to be four or five inches in diameter travelling at about three hundred miles an hour in this thing. Now if you fly in there with an aircraft, you know, if so much as a wheel comes out of it, that’s about all you’ll see. It absolutely pulverizes the thing. So, there were a number of aircraft lost to weather. More lost to weather and largely, I think, to those cumulonimbus clouds as I just described, then were lost to enemy fire. I think that’s an acknowledged fact from that theatre. Now, today’s aircraft have radar that you can see them and they can fly around it. And if you watch the weather radar, you see dense parts. They’re red and so on. Well, there was none of that. It was just visual and so if you’re flying at night, now the thermals cooled down a bit at night. But if you catch them at the end of the day when it’s just dark, there’s still a huge amount of turbulence going on. And you can have the aircraft pointed up like that with full throttle on and be losing height at the rate of two or three thousand feet a minute, and coming down. And another time, you have it pointed down like that and you’re going up two or three thousand feet a minute. You’re trying to dive and your elevation’s winding up. It’s very fierce weather and if you’re in a place you don’t have room to make those manoeuvres, you hit the ground.