Imagine falling from the sky at 47,000 feet, surrounded by lightning, hail, rain and wind. Imagine feeling your body freeze, swell and bleed as you plummet through a massive storm cloud. Imagine surviving this ordeal for 40 minutes and landing in a forest, alive but injured. This is the incredible story of William Rankin, the man who rode the thunder.
William Rankin was a US Marine Corps pilot and a World War II and Korean War veteran. On July 26, 1959, he was flying an F-8 Crusader jet fighter from Massachusetts to South Carolina, when his engine failed and he lost all power. He had no choice but to eject from his plane, despite the extreme altitude and the lack of a pressure suit. He did have an oxygen mask, which saved him from suffocating.
As he ejected, he felt a sudden shock of cold. The temperature was -58 °F (-50 °C). His glove on his left hand was ripped off, exposing his skin to frostbite. He also suffered from decompression, which caused his abdomen to swell and blood to leak from his eyes, nose, ears and mouth. He said later: “I knew I had to eject but I didn’t want to. I knew what would happen.”
He soon hit the top of a cumulonimbus thunderstorm cloud, which was about 47,000 feet tall. Cumulonimbus clouds are dense, vertical clouds that often produce severe weather conditions, such as thunderstorms, hail and lightning. Rankin experienced all of these as he fell through the cloud. He said: “Lightning appeared, which he described as blue blades several feet thick, and thunder that he could feel.”
His parachute opened prematurely due to the storm’s effect on the barometric switch. This meant that he was trapped in the cloud for longer than he should have been. He was carried by updrafts and hit by his own parachute repeatedly. He also had to hold his breath to avoid drowning in the rain. He said: “One lightning bolt lit up the parachute, making Rankin believe he had died.”
After 40 minutes of falling, he finally reached the bottom of the cloud and saw the ground below him. He landed in a forest and searched for help. He eventually found a road and hitched a ride to a hospital in North Carolina. He had frostbite, welts, bruises and severe decompression injuries. He spent several weeks recovering from his ordeal.
Rankin wrote a book about his experience called The Man Who Rode the Thunder, which was published in 1960. It was praised as a “thrilling true adventure” by critics. He is one of only two known persons to survive a fall from the top of a cumulonimbus cloud; the other was Ewa Wiśnierska, a German paraglider who survived a similar incident in 2007.
Rankin died in 2009 at the age of 88. He is remembered as a brave and lucky man who defied death and lived to tell the tale.
Relevant articles:
– William Rankin: The Man Who Survived Falling Through a Thunderstorm …, Disciples of Flight, 2023-5-30
– 10 Amazing Free Fall Survivors – free fall, vesna vulovic – Oddee, Oddee, 2023-6-2
– The Man Who Fell Through a Thunderstorm and Lived – The Atlantic, The Atlantic, 2023-6-4