For over 50 years, hurricane hunter aircraft based in the U.S. have routinely flown around and into the centers of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes. During that stretch, only one reconnaissance aircraft and its crew have been lost at sea during a mission. That occurred on this date in September 1955 in a hurricane named Janet.

Nineteen Fifty-Five was the year of Hurricanes Connie and Diane here in the Northeast, but they were not the most powerful storms that season. Janet was. At 630am on September 26, 1955, Commander Grover Windham, with an eight-man crew and two newsmen, took off from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in their plane dubbed Snowcloud Five, and headed south-southwest over the Caribbean into Janet, at that time a Category 4 hurricane packing winds over 140 mph. There was no reason to expect anything other than a routine nine-hour flight. Instead, the plane never returned, lost at sea while penetrating the eye of the storm.

A new book tells the story of this ill-fated mission, from preflight checks to the chilling moment of their last transmission. The book is called Stormchasers: The Hurricane Hunters and Their Fateful Flight into Hurricane Janet.