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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
reconnaisance 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 reconnaisance, was done between 500 and 1,500 feet. So we flew in low. The air Force flew in higher. They flew in 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 reconnaisance 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.
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).
