Today in 1959, Marine Corps pilot William Rankin did something no one had ever done before: he passed through the middle of a thundercloud.
And despite the storm’s best efforts, he made it through in one piece.
Rankin was a Lieutenant Colonel who had served in both World War II and the Korean War.
He was flying an F-8 Crusader from South Weymouth, Massachusetts to Beaufort, South Carolina.
There were storm clouds at about 45,000 feet on the flight path.
Rankin and another pilot flying with him decided to climb to 47,000 feet to avoid them.
Which would have been fine, except that this is when Rankin heard a loud bump and a rumble.
Then his engine stopped.
There was auxiliary power, but when Rankin pulled the activation lever, it broke off.
Rankin had to eject; it was the only option left.
But that didn’t mean it was a great option.
Because when you eject from a plane you’re flying over a thundercloud, you end up falling through the thundercloud.
This one had an air temperature of something like -65°F.
It was full of big pieces of hail that turned his body black and blue, high winds that made him very seasick, and thunder that was so close by, he felt it as much as he heard it.
Rankin did at least have an emergency oxygen supply, but the storm included heavy rain so he said sometimes he’d breathe in and end up with a mouthful of water.
And he didn’t have a pressure suit on.
He wrote about the decompression this way: “My eyes felt as though they were being ripped from their sockets, my head as if it were splitting into several parts.”
His parachute system was designed to deploy automatically at 10,000 feet, but because the conditions were so bizarre, it went off too early, so it took like forty minutes to finally land.
And just before he reached the ground, his parachute got caught in some trees and he went headfirst into a tree trunk.
After all that, there was one bit of good news: Rankin had landed near a road.
A passing driver took him to a nearby store, he ended up in an ambulance and then at the hospital, where they found he was actually in pretty good shape.
He had plenty of bruises from the hail, some minor frostbite and residual shock from the decompression, but no serious or permanent injuries.
Rankin not only survived, he returned to duty and wrote a book about the experience with a suitably epic title: “The Man Who Rode The Thunder.”
Starting today in Tenino, Washington, it’s Oregon Trail Days.
The three day festival will have some looks back at what life was like for the people who traveled the trail, as well as some more modern day activities.
Unless they had three-on-three basketball tournaments on the Oregon Trail and just didn’t tell anybody?
Meet the Marine who ‘rode the thunder’ and lived to tell the tale (Air Force Times)