Mercifully, the fierceness of the storm began to abate, with the pilot able to at last escape the storm’s drafts. “I didn’t hear the thunder, I felt it,” Rankin put it simply. “Gasping for air, swollen, bleeding and battered by hail, it was as though I were under a swimming pool, and I had held my breath several times,” wrote Rankin.įor nearly 40 minutes this cycle continued, with flashes of thunder and lightning striking around him from every direction. To make matters worse, the Marine aviator had exited his jet atop a gigantic thunderstorm - a cumulonimbus tower that, according to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, can be responsible for “large thunderstorms whose updrafts and downdrafts are so closely in balance that such a storm can have a lifetime of several hours.”Īfter free falling for several minutes through hail the size of baseballs that threaten to beat him into unconsciousness, Rankin became aware of another issue - his parachute’s auto-deployment system, which was supposed to deploy at 10,000 feet, seemingly malfunctioned. My eyes felt as though they were being ripped from their sockets, my head as if it were splitting into several parts, my ears bursting inside, and throughout my entire body there were severe cramps.” “I could feel my abdomen distending, stretching, stretching, stretching, until I thought it would burst. “The pain of ‘explosive’ decompression was unbearable,” he continued. “I felt as though I were a chunk of beef being tossed into a cavernous deep freeze,” Rankin recalled in his book “The Man Who Rode the Thunder” - available for a cool $799.29 on Amazon.
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