The pilots patch on a flight suit belonging to the US Air Force 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron "Hurricane Hunters" at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, on May 9, 2017. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

Imagine a wood-paneled bar in an officer’s club on an isolated Texas Air Force base in 1943. Wind rattles the building, heralding the surprise hurricane that has come ashore just 150 miles away.

From a table in a corner, voices rise to meet the storm, the good-natured yelling of men trying to one-up each other. Money clatters on the table and a bet is made: There’s no way a person can fly a plane, by instruments alone, into the heart of a hurricane. One man, the base’s instrument flight instructor, Lt. Col. Joseph B. Duckworth, takes the bet and succeeds — not just once, but twice, in the same day. His flights would eventually lead to the “Hurricane Hunters”, planes sent out by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the military that fly into storms to collect data and improve forecasts.

A wartime setting, a barroom bet and a brave pilot willing to take a chance to prove himself; It’s a satisfying meal for brains raised on fight scenes and epic quests. But it might not be entirely true.

While most online sources — including NOAA’s own hurricane blog — relay some version of the 1943 Duckworth flights as the true tale of the first time humans flew into a hurricane, there are plenty of paper records pointing toward alternate stories.

David Reade, a retired aerospace consultant and aircraft historian, has spent years combing through military and government archives and published some of this research in the Spring 2023 issue of The Journal of the Air Force Historical Foundation. He found that those famous flights might not even have been the first time Duckworth flew into a hurricane — let alone humanity as a whole. In fact, Reade found six other people who might have beat Duckworth to the punch, dating back to a flight in 1920 in an open-cockpit biplane.

That flight was the work of 1st Lt. Charles B. Austin, who set out on a journey from Panama to Washington, DC, as part of early military flight experiments following World War I. Less than two hours in, Austin hit a storm.

He tried to keep flying, but the turbulence eventually damaged his propeller enough that he was forced to turn back. Austin flew another three hours, surrounded by wind and rain, before finally popping out, close enough to where he’d begun that he was able to limp the plane home. Afterward, he’d file a report describing flying through bands of rain and other conditions that we now know are indicative of a hurricane, Reade said.

Navy Hurricane Hunter pilots plot flight courses in Jacksonvile, Florida. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Another even better documented hurricane encounter happened when Capt. Daniel Webb “Tommy” Tomlinson flew a TWA research plane into the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane. At the time, the airline had its own research and development department, which was focused on developing reliable de-icing techniques to keep planes from crashing in bad weather and at high altitudes. How do you test your new de-icer? Apparently, you simply slap it on and send a dude into some bad weather at high altitudes.

Thankfully for Tomlinson, the de-icer worked.

But the real kicker in Reade’s research was the time that a mail delivery plane landed in DC just before the airport there was shut down by 3 feet of storm surge on the edge of the 1933 Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane. The pilot dropped the mail, took off again, and later landed safely at his next stop in Greensboro, North Carolina. He would have had to have flown through the storm to get from one stop to the next, Reade wrote. The pilot: none other than Joseph B. Duckworth.

None of these stories are boring. But they are complicated, and they raise new questions even as they answer others. We don’t know for sure that the storm Austin hit was a hurricane, for example. Similarly, we don’t know why Duckworth wouldn’t have publicized a 1933 flight once he started getting famous for the ones that happened 10 years later. Should we even count Tomlinson if Duckworth had already succeeded?

The story of a bold pilot taking a bet in a little bar in the middle of nowhere is tidier, more straightforward. It has a beginning, middle and triumphant end. It’s got tension and (literal) stakes. And, not for nothing, it’s one guy, one memorable date in history. People prefer a simple story that feels truthful, rather than a messier one that’s more accurate.

Seen here in 1948, the North American Aviation T-6 Texan is a trainer aircraft used to train pilots of the United States Army Air Forces during World War II and into the 1970s. (Camerique/Getty Images)

“My general belief is that this is how it’s always been done,” Reade wrote in a statement to CNN. “You don’t actually believe that, as a child, George Washington cut down a cherry tree and threw a coin across the Potomac River?”

Popular history is often built on catchy narratives because that’s what sticks in our brains and sells papers. And Reade has noticed that, as more writers turn to the internet for research, rather than libraries and archives, a catchy story can end up feeding its own fire — one article linking to another with no one ever checking to make sure the story everyone is repeating is true.

But the truth matters, Reade told CNN. Even if the mythology is just simplifying the real story, we leave people with the impression that history is clear, linear and undisputed. That misconception can make it harder to spot what real truth looks like, in all its messy glory. The barroom bet makes a great story, but the jumble of competing stories gets us closer to understanding the past.

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