Hospital Stay Uncovers Tulsa Veteran's Typhoon-Chasing Naval Flight Career

A Tulsa family says a trip to a hospital helped them discover the brave work their father did as a U.S. Navy pilot in the Philippines after World War II.

Cathie Meeker and her brother, Ken Snitz, said they always knew their father "had flown into hurricanes," but they didn't know any details about exactly what that meant until he opened up to a doctor while he was in the hospital a few weeks ago.

They've since discovered their father was in the first group of aviators to deliberately fly into typhoons in the Pacific. They also discovered he has a treasure trove of documents, photos and even film detailing the dramatic flights he made. For the first time, their father is talking at length about the missions he flew to study typhoons.

At 90, Don Snitz is a very active man who loves to play golf and to travel with his girlfriend. He grew up in Kansas City and joined the Navy after graduating from high school at the beginning of World War II. He took advantage of a program the Navy offered would-be aviators called V7, which gave them two years of college before training them to fly.

The Navy sent Snitz to Hutchinson, Kansas; Norman, Oklahoma; Yankton, South Dakota and Iowa City, Iowa for training. It was in Iowa City that he met the daughter of the man who owned Globe Clothiers in Tulsa, eventually marrying her.

After getting out of the Navy in the early 1950s, Snitz moved with his wife to Tulsa after his father-in-law convinced him to leave the sporting goods business and go to work at Globe. Snitz eventually bought out his father-in-law and ran the store for decades.

In the summer of 1945, the U.S. armed forces realized they needed to know more about the powerful typhoons that were disrupting shipping across the northern Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Army Air Corps had used Boeing B-29s to fly over typhoons, but no one had ever flown under the storms in order to study them up close.

The U.S. Navy created a weather reconnaissance squadron called VPW-2, the Typhoon Chasers. The squadron flew Consolidated PB4Y Privateers, the naval version of the B-24 Liberator flown by the U.S. Army Air Corps. Snitz joined VPW-2 and was stationed at Sangley Point on Manila Bay in the Philippines. Other aircraft from the squadron were based on the island of Samar and at Okinawa in Japan.

Snitz arrived at Sangley Point in November of 1945 and flew his first typhoon chasing mission in June of 1946.

“We were assigned. We were excited, we wanted to DO something,” he said. The crews were happy to have an important mission, Snitz said, because the U.S. was downsizing the military after its victory in World War II.

When typhoon season was over, Snitz said, the Navy used him and his fellow pilots as a taxi service, so they flew parts and personnel all over the Pacific in their big four-engine Privateers.

During typhoon season, it was serious business. When a typhoon moved through the area, the units would hand off coverage to the next group of aircraft.

“You had to really know what you were doing. Your life depended on it,” he said. “Some trips we'd get back to the field and we'd run out of gas taxiing to the parking spot.”

Each plane was stripped of its armament and issued a still camera and a 16mm movie camera and the crew given instructions to shoot everything, even the whitecaps on the waves.

“By looking at the whitecaps, they could determine how strong the wind was,” Snitz said with a smile.

In a time before weather satellites, the Navy was desperate for as much information as it could gather about the weather, especially typhoons. That's why the Navy ordered the crews to actually fly into the huge storms.

They did. At an altitude of about 500 feet and a speed of about 150 miles per hour, Snitz said the crew would circle the storm, “crabbing” as it went, which means constantly turning into and out of the storm before finding a way into the eye.

The crew of six included one weather officer who was responsible for the special equipment the plane carried, which Snitz said never worked. As a result, the Navy relied on the observations made by the weather officer and the film shot by the crew.

The flights would last from as short as three hours to as long as nine, with the crew having to be careful to avoid the numerous islands in the area. Since there was no sun or stars visible, the crew had to navigate using nothing but timing and heading, in some cases flying only about 50 mph faster than the 100-mph winds in the storm.

“By the time we got back the paint was all stripped off the airplane," Snitz recounted, amazed at some of the flights he survived. "It's just a miracle."

Snitz' son and daughter said their father never talked much about his typhoon-chasing missions and son Ken said he'd never seen his father's photos from the Pacific until Veterans Day 2014.

When asked why he hadn't spoken much about his weather missions, Snitz said, “No occasion. I guess the questions were never asked.”

Snitz said the key to living past 90 is to have something to look forward to with someone. He golfs and travels, and now, he talks about his experiences in the north Pacific in the late 1940s.

He estimates he made 200-300 typhoon flights in the time he was based in the Philippines.

“The one thing I'm proud of is that we were the first plane to fly underneath the clouds into the eye.”