Navy Hurricane Hunter

Meet Paul Siverly. You will find him leading entertaining tours at the Pensacola National Museum of  Naval Aviation. He is not just a tour guide. Paul Siverly is a retired Navy hurricane hunter and the commander of the first navy reconnaissance flight into Hurricane Camille in August of 1969. While many of us are familiar with the Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunters, the Navy also flew hurricane hunter missions in the 1940s, and then from the 1950s until the early 1970s. What follows are the words of Paul Siverly, a man who met Camille before Mississippi.

Camille was the first storm that I personally flew into. I flew in the Super Constellation. And, it was the first flight that flew into Camille by the Navy and it was south of Cuba. I was the commander. I was the operations officer at the time. And we knew then that it was going to be a horrific storm. because on the radar screen you could actually see the eye. It was almost like it was pulsating. One sweep would be 20 miles across, the next sweep would be fifteen, the next one would be 35. It was something that we had never seen before. It was my first time so it was the first one I saw.

The total flight time as I remember was about 12, 13 hours. And we were in the eye of storm probably 30, 40 minutes. And once we got there and got the information we did not want to stay so we got out. I did not know what to expect. I had been told by other pilots and other crewmen what it was going to be like, but it was nothing like what they had explained to me. And with my 3 and a half years flying as a hurricane hunter, I soon came to realize that no two were the same. I probably flew, somewhere between 40 to 50 missions.

Most of the Navy flying in hurricanes, in weather reconnaissance, was done between 500 and 1,500 feet. So we flew in low. The air Force flew in higher. They flew in what is called the 700mb level which was about 10,000 feet. What was unique about us then was the altitude that we flew the storms in. We flew a procedure, to let the fleet know what was happening on the surface. The reconnaissance that flies today, that is not their concern. They are concerned about where the storm is in relation to the surface but they are not concerned about surface ships.

Once we got into the eye, many times we did not have a physical fix that we could give to fix the airplane from but we knew pretty close where we were. And we could locate it by different navigational aids.

Probably the best tool we had when we were in the storm was the human eye. The Super Connie has a surface radar on the bottom and a height finding radar on the top. And this was used to determine the height of the clouds.

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Back then we had, relied primarily on high frequency, HF. And UHF in close but there was always a lot of static in these too. Early on it was all done by Morse code and the pilot would make the observation, the meteorological officer would make the observation, and they would transcribe that into written script and then the radioman would have to send it out with key. And sometimes that was very long and very tiresome. And some of the storms, when you were flying in a rough storm, you were always welcome to get into the eye because you get all of your messages out then. See, up until that time you were just hanging on. Once you got into the eye and you got the calm of the storm, then you got your messages out and uh, hopefully they received it. (That was the case with Camille).