BONUS | The William Rankin Weathersode Disaster of 1959 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You ever hear the idea that it's not the fall
that's going to kill you, it's the landing. Well, in
today's story, it's definitely the fall. Hello, and welcome to

(00:24):
Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcasts. Together we are going to
rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and un inspiring
but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human
history and around in the world. And today I bring
to you another startling and stunning many disaster sold. We've

(00:46):
done a couple of these now, and they usually follow
the misadventures of one of the more interesting single individuals
to ever have their name stamped into the history books.
Today's story spins directly out of our very recent Bangladeshi
hailstorm Disaster of nineteen eighty six episode, where we learned
all about Earth's hydrological cycle and saw firsthand just how

(01:09):
much damage our weather can inflict on those below it.
And the reason I really wanted to share today's story
so bad was because it makes things so much worse
by highlighting just how much damage it can do to
those above it. Today will be an all weather related
disaster SODE, and the cast of characters won't count in
the hundreds or the thousands. Nope, just one brave man

(01:32):
who spoilers survives everything. I am about to tell you.
I love doing mini sodes, even though they've never really
turned out to be all that many any extra content, really,
and it's all thanks to you, Patreons. You're the only
people on this planet who helped take the heat off
my back long enough for me to be able to
even try to do something like this in the first place.

(01:53):
So thank you and pat yourselves on the back. Full disclosure,
today's story is a weird one and you are simply
not going to believe the escalation of details. But that's
why we're all here. You know, there were times I
really wish I could see your faces. But with all
that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put
on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Today

(02:18):
we are going to discuss one of the luckiest or
unluckiest men to ever put on a marine uniform. Meet
Lieutenant Colonel William H. Rankin. Born in Columbus, Ohio. He
had graduated from Ohio State University Go Buckeyes with a
degree in aeronautical engineering, and when he was old enough,
he enlisted for naval aviator training from the US Navy.

(02:42):
America was at war and he wanted to do his part,
and he did. William Rankin flew a prolific career as
a Marine pilot in World War Two and the Korean War,
and he was still flying during the Cold War, which
we've talked about enough times on this show. No need
to rehash it here, you know, just the threat of
ongoing nuclear annihilation hanging over everyone, and the entire country

(03:04):
being on high alert for anyone or anything up to
and including Santa entering their airspace. And all that matters
is it was a Cold War accident that led William
Rankin to become the hero of today's story. And let's
get into it. On July twenty sixth, nineteen fifty nine,
William Rankin was flying his Vaught FA Crusader, which if

(03:27):
you can't just picture it in your head, is a
carrier based jet fighter. Well, we join him today about
forty seven thousand feet above the eastern coast of the
United States. He's just flying by and his mission that
day was perfectly ordinary, just a routine part of his
duties as a Marine Corps pilot. He was returning from
the South Weymouth Naval Air Station in Massachusetts to the

(03:49):
Marine Corps air Station Beaufort in South Carolina. And let's see,
right about now, it's almost six o'clock flying time, and
if you look out the left side of the plane,
you will see that we are flying over Norfolk, Virginia.
Of course, set this kind of altitude, there's really not
that much to see. I mean, you can see everything,
but everything's all squinty and minuscule, so again, not much

(04:12):
to report. No birds, no bugs, just clear sailing, nothing
but cloud tops as far as the eye could see.
And everything was going just fine until the engine of
his Fa Crusader suddenly stalled. Was it a mechanical failure? Well, yes,
in the sense that the fire warning light on the
instrument panel was flashing pretty hard, and fire is definitely

(04:35):
something that I know mechanics hate, so yeah, we'll just
say mechanical failure. Anyways, he had his degree in engineering,
but he wasn't exactly an actual flight mechanic himself, so
there was not much he was going to be able
to do about all of this. So he put on
his blinkers and he exited the vehicle, which wasn't a

(04:56):
novel experience for him. William Rankin had to eject from
a plane once before during the war, and he did
not love the experience, which is probably a good thing
that his training took over and he went into a
kind of an autopilot. He positioned himself with his feet
on the deck, back straight, shoulder squared. He checked his
torso harness, straightened his tie, reached for the d rings

(05:18):
behind his head, and pulled in his entire seat immediately
rocketed up and away from the vehicle. When he heard
the ejection seat fire, he said, it felt like he
was kicked in the ass by an angry elephant. And
it all happened so fast he barely knew what happened.
All he knew was that he was up and away,
and he thought to himself, well, that wasn't so bad.

(05:40):
That was actually quite lovely. And he saluted his wounded
bird as it sailed smoking into the clouds below. And
next stop for him would be a flawless, picture perfect
descent by parachute to the ground, where he would very
calmly place his boots back on Tara firma. So we
all know that's not going to happen, So here is

(06:02):
where I tell you exactly what happened. The reason he
thought that his ejection was so lovely is because he
barely noticed the blast of wind punching him in the
face where the canopy comes off. The seat separator motor fires,
and after abou zero point five to two seconds, you
end up about two hundred feet or sixty meters away
from where you just were, and from their second cartridge

(06:25):
fires to release the pilot from the seat, and within
about four seconds you get your parachute completely deployed, and
now it's just time for the Marines to come and
find you. Now, pilots do sometimes worry about their ejection seats,
whether they would turn out to be defective, and it
makes a lot of sense, actually, it seems kind of natural.

(06:45):
I mean, pilots are fairly hands on about most aspects
of their planes and the mechanics, but they're not real mechanics,
and the only hardware that they never really actually get
to put their hands on or test for themselves is
the ejection seat. So it just ends up being the
on that you don't fully trust. I mean, you rely
on it, but you don't necessarily rationally trust it. But

(07:06):
there was nothing to worry about, because the ejection seat
worked perfectly. No, it was the canopy ejector that malfunctioned.
It was the whole reason that he didn't feel that
punch in the face from the air entering the cabin. No,
he felt the strange sensation of being dragged through a
row of sharp, uneven teeth as he shot up and
out of the plane. And that's because he had cannon

(07:29):
bald head first through the canopy and as souvenirs, he
was left with surface level stab wounds all over, and
only after he rose from the cockpit then the tremendous
blast of air hit him, which would have felt like
more of a blast of wall. Really, he later described
finding himself in what he called a freezing, expanding mass

(07:50):
of pain. And it's worth restating he lives through everything
I'm about to tell you. In that first moment, the
only thing that he knew for certain was that he
was dead. He was forty seven thousand feet in the air,
it's basically fourteen kilometers or about nine miles, and in
one split second he had gone from a very toasty,

(08:11):
uncomfortable cockpit temperature of seventy five fahrenheit or twenty four
celsius to about minus seventy fahrenheit or minus fifty six celsius.
And we've talked about frostbite on the show before, and
for reference, below thirty fahrenheit or negative thirty four celsius,
when you throw in a little wind chill, you get
frostbites setting in in well less than ten minutes. But

(08:32):
this is the first time on the show that we
have encountered the conditions for instant frostbite. And all of
that is completely excluding the fact that he's also facing
at least one hundred miles an hour of wind chill,
which makes things unspeakably worse. Almost instantly, every exposed part
of his body began to burn as if he was
on fire. It was wind burn because wind strips the

(08:54):
moisture from the outer layer of your skin and it
makes it feel like it's burning out. And I should
also mention William Rankin was wearing a standard flight suit.
They're designed for high altitude jet pilots, and they look
fantastic and they provide at least some protection from the
cold and lower pressure. But what he really wanted was
a full pressure suit. A full pressure flight suit maintains

(09:18):
a higher level of pressure around your body to help
you feel like you were hanging around closer to sea level,
which certainly makes breathing easier. And for reference, just another
eighty six kilometers or fifty four miles above us is
the legal binding quote edge of space according to global
space treaties. They call it the Carmen line. And you're

(09:39):
not going to find any t shirts or postcards, only
frostbite and death. And when I said forty seven thousand feet,
that was really more of a guess. See, that was
the last altitude that Rankin remembered seeing before ejecting, and
his orientation had been to climb at the moment, so
it is entirely possible that he was much higher. And

(10:00):
either way, it's a little too high to be out
in your skivvies, because first, the air pressure is different.
It's only about twelve and a half percent of what
you're enjoying right now listening to this. And the problem
with being exposed to low air pressure is that when
the body is exposed to lower pressures like that, there's
a reaction where your body fluids, including the stuff in

(10:20):
your lungs, can and will boil. And if that wasn't
enough of a problem. There's again not a lot of
oxygen there, so not a lot for your lungs to
transfer into your bloodstream, so hypoxia sets in to you know,
not make for you to think so good, leading to
unconsciousness and within a couple of minutes to death. Just

(10:41):
let me break it down like this, In the first
ten to fifteen seconds, all of your useful brainsmanship is
going to get used up and you're going to become
Lieutenant Potato. And I say that specifically because of a
video of a marine recruit that they've worked this guy
so hard when they asked him if he knew where
he was, his answer was hash Brown's okay, well that's

(11:04):
hash Brown, sir. After about thirty seconds without oxygen, you
just basically fold like a puppet, which has got to
be preferable to staying awake for the next few minutes
while your body fluids vaporized inside of your veins and
organs again from the lack of surrounding air pressure. They
call it embolism, and without getting into it, all your

(11:25):
tissues swell, all your capillaries burst. It basically has the
power to rip up your organ donor card if you
follow my meaning. But Rankin did not squeeze out of
his flight suit like a paste. However, the gases inside
his body, like his intestines and his sinuses and his stomach,
began expanding and stretching until he was sure his stomach

(11:47):
would burst like the dinner scene on the Nostromo if
you follow the reference. All that swelling puts pressure on
all the surrounding organs and tissues, which is said to
be indescribably painful. As Rankin later confirmed, he said he
felt like he was on a rack, and not like
a clothing rack. I mean like the torture device from

(12:07):
medieval times where your arms and your legs are attached
to gears rotating in opposite directions, you know, like a
medieval spinal decompression treatment like that. And his stomach looked
like he was in labor, and he felt like the
rack was being pulled tighter and tighter, and that the
pain was unbearable. Remember in total recall where Arnold Schwarzenegger

(12:29):
fell out of that window on Mars and it looked
like his head was having a yard sale. Well, it's
the exact same thing here. His eyes were practically being
forced from his sockets, and his ears were bursting. Every
part of his body was cramping up, and his head
felt like it was actively ripping in half. The sensation
of suffocating, combined with the pain and confusion from the

(12:50):
hypoxia and the extreme cold, is said to lead to
overwhelming panic and terror, and yeah, I believe that. However,
Rank fought the terror, and as he fell, the tinted
visor on his helmet just ripped off flew away, which
blinded his unblinkable eyes. I normally talk about people getting
injured in their unblinking eyes, but in this case his

(13:14):
eyes had come so far out of his head that
he could not wrap his eyelids around them, so no blinking,
all peeking, and his poor freezing wind burnt, no blinking
blind ass eyes saw the light breaking up into flashes
before him. No, he wasn't actually losing his eyesight. He
was falling into the fleecy tops of clouds, well mostly fleecy.

(13:36):
There was this one that had a dark flat top
to it, definitely a cumulonimbus cloud. But Reacan had better
things to worry about. For one, he'd started spinning. Oh,
he was spinning, all right. He described the world as
a brilliant smear of color, like a kaleidoscope of rotating
brilliant tones set against a purplish void, which sounds like

(13:57):
a version of what we will all see when we
are dying. The sun blurred by as streaks of reddish orange,
and nine out of ten of us would be unconscious
by now. At a minimum, this would have been more
than enough to make you forcefully spray yourself empty from
all orifices. And William Raankin was absolutely convinced that he

(14:18):
was as good as dead. He just wanted to know
how much more excruciating pain he had to go through
before he finally got to die. But then something happened,
something mental. Just as he plunged through the soft white
tops of the clouds, he became overwhelmed with a feeling
of elation and gratitude. He realized that he was still

(14:39):
conscious and alive, and he hung on to that thought
for dear life. All he had to do was not
panic and ride this out, and he'd be fine. Easier
said than done. Remember, he was spinning, was see by
now he was fully tumbling, which is arguably worse, and
not just ump, I mean spinning and cartwheeling and pin

(15:03):
wheeling through space. You know those multi access spinning simulators
sometimes you see they put astronauts in the ones that
spin vertically and horizontally and diagonally all at the same time.
While he was being spun and stretched so fast that
he was forced into a basic starfish pose of uselessness.
His arms and his legs were no longer functional, and

(15:24):
it was all the g forces. Now Enlisted personnel are
trained to never accept defeat. So he tried to pull
his arms back into his body, but the exertion was
like trying to bench a Dodge caravan, and worse, pulling
his arms in was only making the spinning faster. Think
about figure skaters or divers. It's called the conservation of

(15:46):
angular momentum, you know, like regular momentum, but it only
applies to things that spin or rotate. So he really
wanted his arms back, but the more he tried, the
worse the situation became. And why did he want his
arms so bad? Oh? See, I forgot to mention when
his visor ripped off, his gas mask ripped off too,

(16:06):
and it was slapping and punching him in the face
this entire time, and he really wanted to make it stop. Also,
the oxygen up here was about as thin as deli meat,
so getting back to some kind of regular breathing would
also be great. Once all the oxygen that he had
pumped into a system before rejecting war off, he was
as good as dead, because it's really hard to nail

(16:29):
a parachute landing from forty seven thousand feet with brain damage.
At worst, his shoot was going to go off at
ten thousand feet whether he was with us or not.
He needed that oxygen, and to add to the list
of things best described as indescribably painful. As he spun
faster and faster, he began to feel like his arms
were being torn from their sockets. The strange thing was

(16:52):
all those unique and boisterous sources of pain were keeping
him awake, and he was thankful for that. He just
kept telling himself, that's fine, keep going, fine, fine, fine, fine,
You're still conscious, and it won't be long now you'll
be falling into denser air. There'll be more oxygen, less decompression,
less pain. Just got to keep going and slowly, very slowly,

(17:13):
as he entered into a denser overcast of gray and
white clouds. The strains seemed to ease on his legs
and then his arms. They were now simply flopping like
a car dealership balloon man. But he was able to
finally fix his oxygen mask. No one more getting slapped
in the face, no more choking for air. Well, mostly

(17:34):
imagine being in so much all over, full body pain
that you don't realize that your helmet had caught air
underneath it and was trying to pull away with the
strap acting as a noose, trying to remove your head.
He grabbed his helmet with all of his strength to
try to ease the tension, and he was in denser
air now, which means he had air, He wasn't being choked,

(17:55):
and none of his limbs or genitals had ejected from
his flight suit. Was enormously pleased with himself for staying
conscious and tull he really wanted, but that in a parachute,
which he did not have above him, and he described
an overwhelming urge to pull the cords on his personal shoot,
but he knew he was way too high for that,
and he had this barometric sensing device on his arm

(18:18):
that was gonna pop automatically at ten thousand feet like
we said, but there was something about his experience so
far that kind of eroded his confidence. He managed to
overcome the need to pull his parachute. He just had
to constantly remind himself that if he floated down from
whatever height he was at now, he would basically run
out of oxygen, suffocate, freeze, and then finally shatter once

(18:40):
he hit the ground. So instead of grabbing a shoot ring,
he grabbed onto his helmet and his oxygen mask. He'd
become a little overprotective of them now that they had
both tried to kill him. And that is when he
felt something streaming down his face and his neck. It
was blood, and he was worried that maybe he broke
his nose, but that's silly. What he actually did was

(19:03):
way worse. The explosive de compression of leaving his aircraft
without a pressure suit ruptured the capsules in his eyes
and ears, and his nose and his mouth, and that's
where all the blood was spraying from. It was coming
from every hole in his head. Of course, while all
that was happening, he was still plummeting helplessly. But the

(19:23):
further he fell, the thicker and heavier the air began
to feel he was completely buried in cloud, and he
lost all sensation except for the sound of the air
rushing past and his oxygen hose dancing in the wind.
He was still pretty stupefied from the lack of oxygen,
and he began fiddling with his hose. He couldn't tell
if it was his main hose or his emergency hose,

(19:44):
and somehow and all of that, his glove flew off.
He managed to lose both gloves and his hands froze
within seconds, which is a fairly painful thing to have happened.
The only saving grace was the numbness, which was helping
him tolerate the pain. Cloud around him grew darker, and
it robbed him of all sense of reference. He felt

(20:05):
like he was in a void, and he said he
couldn't tell whether he was spinning or rolling, or tumbling
or cart wheeling, or whether he was on his back
or his stomach or falling feet First, he wanted to
pull the chute so hard, but first he thought he
should use whatever's left of his brain to do a
little math. He was trying to calculate the rate of
his fall, and he thought he'd been falling for maybe

(20:28):
four or five minutes according to his watch, which he
could barely see with his frozen eyeballs, and he was
falling at an average rate of about ten thousand feet
per minute maybe. And then he began confusing the math
behind a human being falling through space with the physics
of a plane landing. And he got really confused, and
he had to slap himself straight and really had to

(20:49):
dumb stuff down. He was a person, not a plane.
He left his plane at six p m. And if
he had been falling for this long, why hadn't his shootover?
And I mean, how come he hadn't just exploded against
the ground already. He had no idea. He had just
had to wait. I mean, he had to trust his
gear and his training. And then he got hit in

(21:10):
the face with a little rock, and another and another.
It was hail. He was not about to land. He
was still in the clouds and he was being pelted
by hail. Now, if you remember from our Bangladesh he
Hailed disaster episode. Those frozen lumps of rain are carried
to freezing heights by updrafts, where they run into more moisture,

(21:31):
which then refreezes and makes them thicker than before, and
this just repeats until they're too heavy to stay airborne
and they fall. Now you know how we knew this
was true. The moisture in the clouds was freezing to
his skin and his eyeballs. He was turning into a
human size piece of hail. So he held his eyes
shut tight, and he tried to calculate the odds of

(21:51):
whether his flight suit turning into a soup bag with
an unopened parachute was greater or less than his chances
of freezing to death, and he decided to pull his shoot. Well,
he almost did see at that exact moment, his body
suddenly lurched violently upwards, his shoot inflated, and he wasn't
being pulled up. He just had his downward momentum slashed.

(22:14):
When this happens, your straps tighten and your spine compresses,
and your head whips forward and your stomach lurches pretty hard,
and you shit your pants. And it only lasts a
few seconds, but it's unforgettable. He knew his shoot would
open at a level where he was no longer going
to need his oxygen mask, which was great timing because
his supplemental oxygen had been all gobbled up. The thing

(22:37):
was in the thick overcast. Without reference, he couldn't tell
the position of his body and how fast he was falling.
And he knew his shoot was open, but he had
no idea if that it even fully deployed. The riser
cords were pretty tight, so he knew that was a
good sign. But by his rough math, he's at the
ten thousand foot level. He's descending now at about one
thousand feet per minute, so he should be down in

(22:59):
about ten minutes. It wasn't quite as cold, and at
this point he started getting reacquainted with bodily sensation, and
how did that go well? In his words, he felt
as if his body had been wrung out and all
his internal organs and bones and flesh were painfully reshaping itself.

(23:19):
His face was completely raw and swollen, and his hands
were completely numb and icy, very very stiff. He also
became aware that apparently he might have sliced a finger
half off while he was ejecting, but there's nothing he
could do about that. And he continued to fall. But
this is the point where things started to become turbulent.

(23:40):
He felt moments of halting zero g as he was
suddenly lifted by updrafts and let go. And it was
at that moment that it finally sank in. His plane
had fired him out right over the top of a
gigantic thunderstorm cloud mass. And worse, the rarimentch of pressure
and thunderstorms is usually lower than the surrounding area, so
he actually had no idea how high he really was.

(24:03):
The barometric sensing device could have totally been fooled by
the air pressure, and he could have popped at fifteen
thousand feet twenty thousand feet higher. He had no idea.
He really tried not to think about it. He knew
he'd ejected over Norfolk, but that high up the wind
could blow him out of the state or even over water,
and to try not to think about that either. The
point was he was alive and he was conscious, and

(24:26):
he could think, and this would all be over soon.
He could collapse and fall apart once he was safely
on the ground. All he had to do first was
passed through the center of the cloud. Now, I'm only
taking a moment here to say this story breaks down
into two parts. Part one, which we've just finished, was
titled William Rankin's epic adventure Colin the fun part. Welcome

(24:52):
to part two. Now, if you've heard thunder, you see
the flash, and then you hear the roar and the rumble.
But when you're actually in the thundercloud, apparently it's reversed.
Rankin described the first clap of thunder as a deafening
explosion before he actually saw the flash. He closed his
eyes as tight as he could, as bolts of lightning

(25:14):
immediately flew directly beside him. He would have seen that
blinding flash of light threw his eyelids even with his
hands over them, and the roaring of the sound continued
to vibrate every fiber and cell in his body. William
Rankin was falling through a storm cloud that just became
an active thunderstorm. He said, the boomy claps of thunder

(25:35):
were not auditory sensations, they were unbearable physical experiences. Every
bone and muscle quivered, even his teeth rang in his
skull like tuning forks between his ears. Already having exploded,
he said he didn't really even hear the thunder, He
only felt it. And this continued relentlessly. And I was

(25:56):
about to tell you for how long, but I'm gonna
make you wait. It was pure exploding electric chaos in
every direction, all around him, over above, below, everywhere, and
in every shape imaginable. But when it flashed very close,
it was close enough for him to describe as looking
like a huge bluish sheet several feet thick. And Oddly,

(26:20):
while this was all going on around him and he
was pretty sure he could be vaporized at any second,
he wasn't worried so much about the actual traditional lightning
going on. He kept thinking about Saint Elmo's Fire. No,
not the movie about all the brad packers struggling with
adulthood after college. Nope, I'm talking about the phenomenon of
static electricity that could be seen dancing along the wings

(26:43):
of planes in flight, especially one that just passed through
a storm. And this kind of stuff can seriously damage
a plane, and he wondered, well, what would it do
to a human body that basically just went through a
tumble dryer and picked up its own charge of static electricity. Basically,
he was worried he was going to explode between that

(27:04):
and the lightning, potentially hitting him or his shoot and
reducing either or both into something that looked more like
cellophane in a flame. He was unsure how he could
have been more scared, and between each bolt everything went
completely black, as if he was falling through ink. With
every new flash, he described how it illuminated the clouds,

(27:25):
which seemed to boil all around him, like these huge
vaporous balls of grayish cotton. Oh, and I forgot to
mention it had been torrentially raining this entire time, and
the rain inside of clouds comes in such dense sheets
that he felt like he was suspended in a swimming pool.
There were times where he just held his breath cause

(27:48):
legitimately he could drown. And imagine the insanity of that autopsy,
the first human to drown in the sky, as if
all the rest of this wasn't going to be enough
to be remembered by. And there came a point where
it was so bad he was convinced that he would die,
but realizing that nope, and not yet, he encouraged himself

(28:09):
to have hope. He still felt like he might die
of sheer exhaustion, and it seemed as if the storm
might never end, and he was afraid he was just
going to be swept along with it up the coast.
For hours or days, and that would be it. During
one of the flashes of lightning, he caught a glimpse
of his watch and he could not believe what he saw.
It said it was twenty after six. Even by his

(28:31):
brain damage math, he should have hit the ground like
ten minutes ago. And this is where it finally became
all clear. He was actually trapped inside the storm, being
lifted and dropped repeatedly, but he was so overwhelmingly disoriented
he had no idea. So the question now was how
long was this going to last? All he knew for

(28:54):
sure was he was going to die, but it wasn't
going to be from boredom. And right at that moment,
a powerful blast of air hid him from below and
actually threw him up and into his own parachute, and
in an instant he could feel the clammy, wet silk
draped all over him like a sheet. And at that
point you gotta reimagine your autopsy again, you know, pummeled

(29:14):
by hal drowned in his own parachute, and then found
him paled onto a treetop. But by some indescribable combination
of factors, he was spun on all axis and spat
out alive with his parachute we filled above him, which
was truly miraculous. Of course, he was convinced it was
all going to unravel and fly apart at any moment,

(29:35):
But he told himself, if that sheet of fabric can survive,
so can he, and survive with a new appreciation for
how dangerous and painful hail can be. He said he
felt as though he were being pounded by a symphony
of hammers on every part of his body. He figured
they were about baseball size, but he was too afraid
to look for fear of having his eyes punched out.

(29:57):
And besides, they could just go and calculate the size
of the later just based on the bruising. And I
remind you he lives through this story. He told himself
that if he survived, he would be sending a very
flattering letter to the manufacturer of his flight helmet. It
was obvious his skull would have softened up real nice
buy now. Without it. This thing protected him while he

(30:18):
was flying through his canopy. It protected him from the
blast of air when he ejected, It gave him some
level of protection from the sub zero temperatures, and it
took the brunt of the hail. He kept himself from
panicking to death by keeping his mind busy thinking about
all the things that he'd miss if he spent the
rest of the week up there, and he thought about
memorizing landmarks on the way down. He'd already been up

(30:40):
there for I'm not going to tell you how long
yet when he suddenly remembered something horrifying. He spent some
time in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay receiving gunnery training. And
the thing about being in Cuba was it's a tropical
location and they get thunderstorms. They pretty much happened daily,
but some of those storms seemed to kind of park themselves,

(31:01):
just set there for days or weeks at a time.
In fact, there was this one thunderhead that stayed over
the bay for so long that the staff just nicknamed
it Duty Storm. Pilots even just flew around the thing
like it was a permanent fixture. And that's the thing.
What if this was one of those permanent fixtures. I mean,
they're pretty common during the summer months in these parts.

(31:22):
He looked up and he put his hands together and
he prayed to Jesus. He said, Jesus, I don't know
what I did to piss you off so bad, but
please don't let this be a duty storm. Then he
said amen, and he resigned himself to playing unintentional prisoner
for as long as it took. He knew at some
point the storm was going to run out of energy

(31:43):
and eventually he would just be free and the Guinness
people would be there to hand him a medal and
a plaque that he could throw up all over. Eventually,
the air did become smoother, the rain began to fall
more gently, and he could actually see, and before he
knew it, he could see a flash of green. It
was earth. He wasn't over water, and his eyes hadn't

(32:06):
flown out of his head. This was all good, and
it was very important that he now not get killed
by the landing. After all of that, he was about
three hundred feet from the ground and completely forgot about
his dozens and dozens of injuries, just long enough to
focus on the evergreens coming up quickly. He gritted his
teeth and closed his eyes and crossed his legs and

(32:29):
cupped his chunk. Those trees looked sharp, and he was
pretty sure his autopsy was going to read impaled by tree.
But here is something that I tell people in my
own life. Nothing is ever as bad as it is
in your imagination before it actually happens. He expected a
island landing, but what he got was not that bad.

(32:52):
His shoe got caught in the tree tops and it
swung him wide and around, right into a tree cap,
and the next thing he knew, he was lying on
his side touching mud. He could not believe he was
on the ground, just outside Bethel, North Carolina. To be exact,
he just lay there, vibrating, just vomiting from the altitude sickness,

(33:13):
and burning up any little traces of adrenaline still left
in his body. He was in bad shape. He had
just survived a brutal free fall through tens of thousands
of feet of cumulinimous thunderstorm, which then dragged him by
turbulent updrafts and down drafts, soaking him merely drowning him
in rain water, and exposing him to frostbite and severe

(33:37):
decompression trauma and oxygen deprivation. Four are you ready? Forty minutes?
He was in the air for forty minutes while lightning
struck and exploded all around him. And all of this
after flying headfirst through the canopy of his plane. I
tried doing the math on the real feel and concluded

(34:01):
that this trip that he had would have felt like
almost exactly four weeks. I said, you would have a
hard time with the escalation of events in this story,
and literally any single aspect of this story taken in
isolation would have been, by itself, the worst story of
all time. He fell all the way through the storm

(34:21):
just to get picked up dragged to the top, where
he would then do the whole thing over and over
and over again for forty minutes. He honestly could have
walked to the ground in less time than that. He
was severely bruised and obviously disoriented and bleeding from every
hole in his body, including all the new ones that

(34:42):
he gained from the ejection, but he was overjoyed to
no longer be moving. There is no Guinness World Record
for being dizzy, but can you imagine how bad your
sea legs would be? After forty minutes of twirling in
three dimensions, the last thing he remembered was cutting a
handful of soil and eating it. He then stumbled through

(35:03):
the woods to a nearby road, where he was lucky
enough to thumb down a local farmer who helped him
get to a phone, and that farmer became famous for
picking up the most famous hitchhiker in the state's history.
I mean, can you imagine, son, you don't look so good?
What the hell happened to you? And this guy's got
to explain that a cloud basically treated him the way

(35:25):
that Kevin treated those burglars and home alone. He did
end up in hospital, and he was treated for eleven
hundred injuries, but he made a full recovery. So what
became of him after this? Well, first, he became the
third most famous pilot after Neil Armstrong and the Wright brothers,
and went on to earn his stripes, eventually being assigned

(35:48):
as a United States Navy Strike Fighter tactics instructor at
the US Navy Fighter Weapons School. Oh you never heard
of it? You ever heard of top Gun? Yeah, it's
a real place. It's at the Naval Air Station Miramar
in California, and it is literally the place where they
train the best of the best on air combat maneuvers
and dog fighting and just overall tactical skills and the

(36:11):
hoops that an individual has to jump through to get
into top gun are pretty extraordinary, but they are nothing,
nothing against what William Rankan already experienced in his flying career.
He later learned that this storm had been one of
the most violent ever recorded on the East Coast, which

(36:32):
brought him very little comfort, but was included in his
tell all autobiography, The Man who Rode the Thunder. I
honestly can't think of anyone in history with the kind

(36:52):
of resilience and gumption to make it through a tail
this insanely testing without losing their marbles. William H. Rang
will forever live on in the imaginations of those who
fear flight and all aspects of air travel with awe
and terror. I mean, we've talked about airline passengers falling
to their deaths in past episodes that had more fun

(37:14):
than this, And I do hope that I have not
turned you off a flying or clouds or the military,
And at a minimum, I hope that you enjoyed the story.
I had a lot of fun telling it, and I
have a lot of empathy for will Rankin. This man
faced several years' worth of mental health hurdles in forty

(37:35):
minutes and came out on top his mind. Bob barded
him with relentless thoughts of death and panic, but he
did not let any of that get to him. He
kept his head on straight and he ignored every negative thought.
I'm reminded constantly that that kind of mental perseverance is
rare but achievable. See building a mental toughness or resilience

(37:59):
means in racing challenge, which works two ways. Reframing your
thoughts as you're having them so that you don't see
every crisis as an impossible slog is key, but it's
also about accepting the things that you just can't change.
It means having a little compassion for yourself, especially in
bad situations. And what William Rankin did that day was

(38:21):
a masterclass in self control and resilience. And it was
my pleasure and my honor to bring his story to you.
And again I thank you, Patreons, and I hope you
enjoyed this. And always remember, don't be shy. Let me
know if you've got your own hometown horror story or
miniso that you would love to hear more about. Now,

(38:43):
I make no secret to the fact that I will
spend hundreds of hours making your awful dreams come true.
And I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it,
and I guess that's it for now. The new full
length episode will be dropping shortly, but until we talk
it again, safety goggles off and thanks for listening.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}BONUS | The William Rankin Weathersode Disaster of 1959