Lake City's Hurricane Hunter Killed in 1955

"Lost at Sea" is inscribed on a monument at Lake City's Memorial Cemetery, followed by the title, "Hurricane Hunters."
The monument to Lt. George W. Herlong, located at the graves of his parents, pays tribute to the Lake City native who disappeared with the rest of his crew almost 50 years ago on the only airplane lost in a mission inside an Atlantic hurricane.
Herlong, who grew up in the bright pink, 19th-century house at the corner of Alachua Avenue and U.S. 90, was a co-pilot on the Navy Neptune P2V that was probing the eye of Hurricane Janet in late September 1955. He was 25.
The Right Rev. Bert Herlong, now the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, has fond memories of the two brothers making model airplanes and riding their bicycles to the old airstrip in Lake City, where they would wash airplanes in exchange for a ride.
Herlong thinks about his brother, especially when hurricanes threaten U.S. coastline, as they've done frequently to Florida in the past two months.
"I think about all the terrible damage done by storms over the years," Herlong said in a telephone interview from his Nashville office. "The place I lived in Jacksonville wasn't a great distance from the naval air station, so I was reminded every time I drove by there."
The story of Herlong and the rest of the Airborne Early Warning Squadron Four crew is told in the 2002 book, "Storm Chasers: The Hurricane Hunters and Their Fateful Flight into Hurricane Janet," by David Toomey.
"They entered and explored the most powerful storms on earth in aircraft of World War II vintage," Toomey wrote of the early Hurricane Hunters. "They estimated the drift of their aircraft by looking at windblown waves, and they located the hurricane they were seeking with rudimentary radio waves. They had no computer technology, no global positioning system, no satellite images."
The book also gives three scenarios of how the end might have been like for the crew. This was especially difficult for Herlong to read.
"I always had in my mind some kind of picture of what it must have been like," he said. "I just pictured a huge racing storm, with the airplane being tossed about. I remember him telling me about flying really low, close to the waves.
"So I always wondered if they might have hit some kind of a downdraft. You always wonder, but you never know."
Longtime resident Morris Williams was in Boy Scouts with the younger brother and also remembers G.W. Herlong as "an exceptionally bright young man." Herlong excelled in math and science, as well as model airplanes, which were prominently displayed in the family home. It was this love of airplanes that eventually led Herlong into hurricane reconnaissance.
When news that the plane was missing reached Lake City, Williams remembers residents' surprise that there was even a hurricane flying mission.
"It was surprising that we had airplanes flying into these hurricanes," Williams said. "We weren't at the level of meteorology that we are now. I remember thinking, 'Why would the government send a plane into a hurricane?'"
Herlong graduated from Florida State University and enlisted in the Navy. He was selected as a candidate for Officer's Candidate School and eventually sent to Naval Air Station Jacksonville for the Hurricane Squad.
"He was an excellent pilot," his brother said. "He was, what you would call in baseball, a natural. He had all the moves and instincts."
Herlong and the rest of Commander Grover Windham's 9-man crew and a Canadian news team left Guantanamo Bay, Cuba at 6 a.m. Sept 26, 1955, in the middle of the worst hurricane season on record.
As second pilot, Herlong assisted the crew in planning missions by obtaining pertinent weather forecasts, intelligence reports and maps, according to "Storm Chasers."
He also assisted Windham with operating the controls and equipment and helped the navigator with charting the mission route and calculating the route information and fuel requirements.
"When it first happened," Herlong said, "I believed if anyone could have come out of that alive, my brother would have done it. That's the kind of person he was."
Even though the military had never lost a plane in hurricane missions, several crews had been lost during wartime reconnaissance, and the Air Force lost a 10-man crew in Typhoon Wilma in 1952.
But the crew had no reason to be especially concerned when they took off at 6:30 a.m. from Cuba on Sept. 26. The P2V Neptune was the workhorse of Navy weather reconnaissance, and the squadron had already completed five missions in Hurricane Janet. But this hurricane was 240 miles wide and had already proven to be an erratic storm.
At 8:15 a.m., Windham radioed before penetrating the storm and the pilot lost radio contact at 10:15. By 11 p.m., the Navy classified the plane as overdue and the crew as officially missing. Neither the remains of the plane or any sign of the crew has ever been found.
Herlong was living in a fraternity house at the University of Florida when his father contacted him to tell him his brother was missing. He had fallen away from the Episcopal Church, but the tragedy sent him back to his faith and his calling.
Services were held for Herlong and five of his crew mates and the newspaper reporters on Oct. 4 at the NAS Jacksonville Protestant Chapel.
One of Herlong's most vivid memories are of wreaths being loaded on to a plane, which dropped them at the last known position of Squadron Four.
"We saw them take them onto the airplane and flying away," Herlong said. "We watched that plane until we could no longer see it. I had dreamed about those wreaths for a long time after that."
When hurricanes dominate the news, Herlong thinks about his brother and the lives that are saved each year because of the people who risk their lives by flying into storms that chase most people hundreds of miles in the other direction.
"Think of the number of lives that have been saved by the Hurricane Hunters doing their jobs," he said. "What they were doing was a lifesaving mission. There was something noble about that."