Today’s Storm-tossed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
On July 26, 1959, two F8U Marine Corps Crusader fighter jets took off from Weymouth, Massachusetts headed for Beaufort, North Carolina on a routine training mission. They were piloted by Lt. Col. Bill Rankin and his wingman, Lt. Herbert Nolan. As they approached North Carolina, both pilots ascended to 47000 feet in order to stay above a massive thunderstorm forming below. They were flying at Mach 0.82, close to the speed of sound, when Rankin’s engine made a grinding noise, a thump and then died, and a fire warning light began flashing in the cockpit. Rankin radioed Nolan: “Power failure. May have to eject.”
Rankin was not particulary worried at the prospect; he was a veteran of WWII and the Korean War and had once had to bail out of an aircraft under heavy fire. He knew the ejection would not be pleasant, however. He wore no pressure suit, but his oxygen mask would allow him to breathe until he’d descended to 10000 feet. At 6:00 PM Rankin pulled the ejection handles on his seat and was propelled out of the plane with such force that his left glove was blown off. The temperature was minus 58F and he sustained immediate frostbite. The sudden decompression also caused a painful abdominal swelling and bleeding from his nose, eyes, ears and mouth.
Rankin expected to free-fall until a barometric switch automatically opened his parachute at 10000 feet, slowing his descent. He had to fight the urge to pull his ripcord, as opening the chute prematurely would cause him to fall too slowly, depleting his limited oxygen supply. Rankin began to think that something had gone wrong with his switch and was even more tempted to open his chute manually. Then he realized he was falling straight down into a towering cummulonimbus cloud. His visibility was reduced to near zero, and the sudden change in air pressure triggered his parachute to open. Unfortunately, Rankin was still well above his targeted 10000-foot altitude, and was also at the mercy of the storm’s updrafts. He would fall for a distance, then the updraft would send him back up again, sometimes flinging him into his canopy, which would then tangle itself around him.
Rankin faced other dangers as well. The air was so full of suspended moisture that he had to hold his breath at times to avoid drowning in midair. Hail pelted him and lightning “like blue blades” flashed all around him. The violent spinning and tossing of the storm caused him to vomit, and his limbs were completely numb.
Rankin finally sensed a rise in temperature and a slowing of the winds. When he was able to gather his senses, he saw that he had exited the storm cloud and was now only a few hundred feet above the ground. His chute had somehow survived the beating it had taken and he was able to steer toward a flat area of land. The wind gusted one last time and threw him headfirst into a tree, but his flight helmet saved him from serious injury. When he was safely on the ground, Rankin looked at his watch. It was 6:40 PM; he’d been trapped inside the thunderstorm for forty minutes. It had seemed like ages.
Rankin got his bearings and walked to a road, where he tried to flag someone down for help. He had some difficulty at first in getting any drivers to stop; he was soaked through, bruised and frostbitten, splattered with blood and vomit and must have looked like a wild man. Finally however, a driver stopped and took him to a nearby store, where an ambulance was summoned.
Bill Rankin’s injuries proved to be fairly minor under the circumstances: frostbite, bruises and decompression shock. He recovered fully and the next year wrote a book about his experience: “The Man Who Rode the Thunder” now out of print. Bill Rankin is the only person to have ejected into a thunderstorm and survived. He died in 2009 at the age of 89, just a few weeks short of the fiftieth anniversary of his ordeal.
Culled From: Damn Interesting
Submitted by: Aimee
Talk about the storms and strife of everyday life… – Aimee