'At first there was no sensation of falling, only of zooming through the air,' said William Rankin of the moments after he ejected form his stricken jet. Within seconds, he was suffering from the effects of the inhospitable environment at 47, 000ft.

'I felt as though I were a chunk of beef being tossed into a cavernous deep freeze,' he remembered. ‘Almost instantly all exposed parts of my body – around the face, neck, wrists, hands and ankles – began to sting from the cold.’ Even more uncomfortable was the decompression caused by the low pressure at the top of the troposphere as he began to free fall until his parachute would automatically open. He was bleeding from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth as a result of the expansion of his insides, and his body became distended, 'Once I caught a horrified glimpse of my stomach, swollen as though I were in well-advanced pregnancy. I hade never known such savage pain.' The one benefit of the extreme cold was that it began to numb his body…

Deep within the ice-particle upper region of the Cumulonimbus it was dark with zero visibility. This made Rankin totally disorientated, with no idea of his altitude. For all he knew, without his parachute opening he might hit the ground at any moment. It was therefore with great relief that he felt the violent jolt as his parachute finally deployed…

Soon the turbulence became much more severe. He had no visual point of reference in the gloomy depths but he sensed that, rather than falling, he was being shot upwards with successive violent gusts of rising air – blasts that were becoming increasingly violent. And then for the first time he felt the full force of the cloud.

‘It came with incredible suddenness – and fury. It hit me like a tidal wave of air, a massive blast, fired at me with the savagery of a cannon… I went soaring up and up and up as though there would be no end to its force.’ Rankin wasn’t the only one being hurled up and down. In the darkness around him, hundreds of thousands of hailstones were suffering the same fate. One minute they were falling downwards, dragging air down with them; the next minute they were swept back up by the enormous convection currents within the cloud.
With this falling and rising, the hailstones picked up freezing water and grew in size, hardening layer by layer like gobstoppers. These rocks of ice pelted Rankin with bruising force. He was now vomiting from the violent spinning and pounding and he shut his eyes unable to watch the nightmare unfolding. At one point, however, he did open them to find himself looking down a long black tunnel burrowing through the centre of the cloud. ‘This was nature’s bedlam,’ he said, ‘an ugly black cage of screaming, violent, fanatical lunatics… beating me with big flat sticks, roaring at me, screeching, trying to crush me or rip me with their hands.’ Then the lightning and thunder began.
The lightning appeared as huge, blue blades, several feet thick, which felt as though they were slicing him in two. The booming claps of thunder, caused by the explosive expansion of the air as the enormous electrical charge passed through, were so overpowering up close that they were more like physical impacts than noises. ‘I didn’t hear the thunder,’ he said, ‘I felt it.’ Sometimes he had to hold his breath to avoid drowning from the dense torrents of freezing rain. At one point he looked up just as a bolt of lightning passed behind his parachute. It lit up the canvas, which appeared to the exhausted pilot as an enormous white-domed cathedral. As the image lingered above him, he thought that he had finally died.

Cloudspotters will be pleased to learn that Lt.-Col William Rankin didn’t die. After his vision of the parachute billowing as a cathedral above him he began to notice the air becoming less turbulent, the rain and hail losing intensity. He was finally emerging form the underside of the cloud.
In spite of his ordeal, Rankin managed to land successfully in a forest of pine trees. The storm was still raging, but on the ground it was nothing compared with what he’d experienced above. Finding that his limbs were not broken, the pilot managed to pick himself up and stumble in search of a road for help.
When he was later examined in the hospital at Ahoskie, North Carolina, the doctors reported that his body was discoloured from frostbite and covered in welts and bruises from the impact of the hailstones. His torso also showed impressions of the stitching of his flight jacket, which had strained against the expansion of his insides in the severe decompression after ejecting. The doctors were as amazed as Rankin was that he’d survived.
Moments after the pilot had landed in the forest, he had peered through the dim light of the storm and just made out the fluorescent hands of his watch. Under normal conditions, a parachute descent from 47,000ft could be expected to take around ten minutes. Given that he had ejected from his jet at exactly 6pm, he was stunned to see his watch read 6.40pm. Rankin had been buffeted up and down by the violent turbulence of the Cumulonimbus for a full forty minutes – no more than a pilot-shaped hailstone in the icy heart of the King of Clouds.