I immediately disengaged the autopilot and turned due north. After twenty minutes or so I saw lights up ahead. I let Artie sleep till we were back on course and the darkness was beginning to fade, but I woke him when I saw a row of large thunderstorms ahead. I had seen a lot of lightning to the east, but in the dark I thought it was much farther off. The closer we got to the clouds, the more ominous they looked. For all of my short flying career I had been warned to stay out of thunderstorms. So far I had followed that advice. I was soon to find out what sound advice it is. I suggested to Artie that we land at Lake Charles and wait until the storm moved off our route. He was almost convinced, because the other two pilots agreed with me, when we saw a C-54, about a thousand feet below, come out of the clouds heading in the opposite direction. Regrettably, Artie assumed that it couldn't be too bad if the C-54 made it through. We found out later that the C-54 had just entered the clouds and, wisely, had made a 180-degree turn and gotten out of them.
We tiptoed into the cumulus clouds at our cruising altitude of 9,000 feet. For the first five minutes it wasn't too bad, just some medium turbulence and light rain. Then suddenly all hell broke loose as we penetrated one of the cells of a monstrous thunderstorm. It was like flying into Niagara Falls. Torrential rain hit the windshield and ripped off the windshield wipers. In the violent turbulence, we dropped more than 2,000 feet, accompanied by an increase in airspeed to near the red line. A few seconds later we shot up to more than our original altitude, slowing almost to a stall. We could not hold altitude even within plus or minus 1,000 feet. Every minute or so we were hit with a tremendous burst of hail, which made the cockpit sound like the inside of a boiler factory. I was afraid that it might break out the windshield, which would have been uncomfortable to say the least.
To maintain as much control as possible all four pilots were fully engaged. I struggled to hold a level attitude with the control wheel, Artie held the heading with the rudder and helped me by using the elevator trim, Brad Brown worked the throttles, cutting the power as we descended and increasing it as we climbed, and Thad Blanton lowered the landing gear to slow us down during each descent and retracted it when we shot upward. From the look on Thad's face, I think he would have preferred to be back on the Tokyo Raid. We kept hoping it would abate, but instead it got worse. Artie called traffic control repeatedly to ask for a lower altitude but got no response except the heavy static caused by the constant lightning. If it was that bad in the cockpit, I wondered how it was going in the cabin. Those poor souls had nothing to do but be terrified.
After about fifteen minutes Artie said, "To hell with traffic control, this plane will come apart if we stay here. I'm going down to three thousand feet. It might be better there. No one else would be stupid enough to be flying in this." Letting down was easier said than done, because we were constantly lifted several thousand feet by violent updrafts.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, we reached the general vicinity of three thousand feet, and it was a bit smoother. The sudden altitude changes were now in the hundreds rather than thousands of feet. Although visibility was still zero, the battering hail had ceased. We were unsure of our exact position. The radio compass was religiously pointing to every lightning flash, and we could not hear the radio beam through the static. Artie decided to make a slow letdown, hoping to break out of the clouds. That was a reasonably safe action, since we were near Mobile Bay. All the country for miles around was low and flat, and we didn't expect to run into another airplane.
During the long, agonizing letdown, we strained our eyes for a glimpse of the ground. We broke out of the clouds at between four hundred and five hundred feet, still in light rain, on the west side of Mobile Bay almost exactly on course. We were home free if the ceiling stayed this high for the rest of the trip, because we were almost in our local flying area. Letting down to two hundred feet as we crossed the bay, Artie followed the familiar beautiful white beach past Pensacola until we spotted the officer's beach club and then turned north across Choctawhatchee Bay. With Eglin in sight, we landed from a straight-in approach, and as we parked on the ramp, everyone let out a thankful sigh of relief. I don't think I ever have been so glad, before or since, to be back on the ground.
As the engines stopped, the door from the cabin burst open, and a large, angry captain, an ordnance officer called Moose, stomped in and yelled, "That's the last time I'll fly with any of you damned hummingbirds!" When I looked back into the cabin, I didn't blame him. Baggage was strewn all over the seats and floor, along with the limp, white- or green-faced bodies of our passengers. We wisely remained in the cockpit until they had staggered off and crawled into trucks.
When we climbed out, the engineer told us to come back and look at the tail. Large sections of the paint on the fuselage and tail were gone, and the right horizontal stabilizer was so badly wrinkled that it had to be replaced. We obviously had made the right decision when we let down to a lower altitude. It was quite possible that we would have lost the tail, and our tails as well.
A few weeks later, to my surprise, rumpled Artie showed up at fighter ops and announced he was now a member of fighter test. I found that he had flown P-40s in the Pacific during the war, surviving two crashes due to engine failures. He was a true character with a good, if rather morbid, sense of humor. His standard greeting when he entered the combination squadron operations and ready room was "Hot day, big crowd, balloon gone up yet?" whatever that means. When asked where someone was, his usual reply was "He went out to shit, and the hogs ate him."
Whenever a pilot in the squadron was killed, Artie would often put on a half-hour act of an undertaker trying to sell the widow a more expensive casket, mimicking an unctuous voice and silent, mincing steps to perfection. I'm sure that much of this clowning was calculated to lift the gloom that hung over the squadron following a fatal accident. If so, he was quite successful. Each pilot had his own way of dealing with the sudden loss of a close friend, one who was engaged in the same kind of flying as he. Artie's shtick helped to ease the pain. Fortunately, test pilots and fighter pilots are imbued with complete confidence in their invulnerability.
A few months after our unforgettable trip, the captain who had warned us against flying in ice became lost in bad weather while flying a Mustang and suffered a fatal crash. At that time the Mustang's only navigation radio was a small, low-frequency receiver, called a Detrola, mounted on the cockpit floor just in front of the seat. It was notoriously unreliable. When he learned of the accident, Artie said he wished Captain So-and-So could come back and do a fifteen-minute Detrola commercial.
Later, when I met his family, I realized that Artie and his wife were vivid proof that opposites attract. She was a lovely, cultured Vassar graduate named Cyrene (pronounced serene, which described her perfectly, by everyone except Artie, who insisted on calling her sigh-reen). She had three children from a previous marriage, two boys and a girl, and Artie and Cyrene had two children, a girl and a boy called, typically enough, Pookins and Buddy Jones. The family's English bulldog, which bore a strong resemblance to Artie, was named Mr. George Turbo.