We’ve been in jams before but none as bad as this one. Our radio is out so we’re deaf as well as blind. Maybe they’re answering us but we can’t hear them.

He sat strapped to his stool before his navigation table. Beneath the dim light he examined his graph of position reports. There was a steady line of small x’s up to the hour 2200, and then the storm had come, masking the stars with a suddenness he’d never seen equaled in all his years of flying. It had been the fastest-dropping curtain in the world. The captain had tried to get on top but because the plane wasn’t pressurized, he couldn’t go beyond 10,000 feet with safety and it was as thick up there as any other place.

Taped on the navigator’s board beside the plotted graph were his other papers, the weather forecast and wind analysis. How could the Cape Verde forecaster have been so far off? he wondered. How could anyone have overlooked the pressures that brewed the swirling, roaring air masses of a hurricane? For that’s what they were flying through; there was no doubt about it. He listened to the beating, blustering winds and rain and wondered what name the U.S. Weather Bureau had given the storm.

A workhorse like their plane was made to ride out even hurricanes but those who guided it needed to know where they were. The navigator looked up at the astrodome of curved Plexiglas above his head. Through it he might have sighted the stars, taking a celestial fix to obtain their exact position. That is, if there were stars to sight. But there were none tonight. And without a radio he couldn’t reach the transmitters of other planes and ships to take bearings upon. The failure of the radio was as strange and unpredictable as the storm itself, but such things did happen. Either the receiver wasn’t functioning or the storm was making reception impossible.

Only loran equipment—long-range navigation equipment—could have helped him now to determine their position on his graph. But the company had decided it was too expensive to install, “unnecessary” was the word they used, pointing out that their planes had flown this route so many times they could almost fly it alone. The company operated on a very stringent economy program, as did most nonscheduled airlines. It had to make every ounce of payload count. The navigator knew their slogan by heart: Economize. Save money. Save equipment. Save men. That’s why they had no separate radio operator, the job of communications being done by the copilot and the navigator. That’s why they were depending upon radio telephone instead of telegraph. That’s why they had no loran. That’s why they were in such a jam!

Desperately the navigator bent over his board again and studied his plotted graph of position reports. He could make only a stab at figuring out their present position, and every minute he worked, another four miles of space swept by.