St Croix Tower Convo

When we arrived in 1989 as a team to give the permanent controllers a break, all these tower windows were blown out by Hugo. For that matter, they were blown out in St. Thomas (KSTT) also. Of course the whole islands were devastated; flattened by continuous 200+ mph winds.

We worked many days with modified headsets not designed for portable radios as the runways were cleared and rain poured into into the tower cab. One of the craziest things happened during our time at STT.

A planeload of US congressmen and senators flew down from Washington to survey the damage, and were flying around the island in a heavy military aircraft in VFR weather. At some point they got lost and in low clouds. We were talking to them, but of course we had no radar, so we couldn't locate them. The tower sat on a hill facing a mountain, and the next thing we hear is the pilot of that military heavy jet finding a hole in the clouds between our hill and that mountain and standing the aircraft on it's wing to avoid both. The noise was deafening with no windows, and as they barely missed us, I could see the terrified faces of the politicians in the plane's windows. As the massive aircraft careened past us, and the approach end of the active runway, all our traffic on final had to scatter, and a waterspout formed for a moment from his wake. We didn't hear from them again, and I marveled at how close they came to being a sad footnote to this powerful storm.

The Caribbean did not get the attention that the mainland received from a much weakened Hugo, I intend to post soon a video honoring that special place, from that time period.