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Hurricane Hunting

September 05, 2008 7:46 PM

People do some pretty crazy things in life -- flying straight into a hurricane is right up there. Or so I thought, until I took a flight with the US Air Force’s hurricane hunters, right into Hurricane Gustav as it was barreling toward Louisiana with 138 mph winds.

The Air Force only has about 50 pilots who are rated to fly into hurricanes. They work for the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, based at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss. They fly C130’s, the sturdy workhorses of the Air Force which ferry troops and supplies all over the world with their 18-hour flying range and ability to land on the roughest of dirt strips. Turns out the C130 is also perfectly suited for hurricane excursions: The airframe is strong enough to survive the turbulence, and the C130 can slow down to about 180 mph without risk of stalling, which improves the vessel's stability.

The missions are long -- up to 12 hours -- as they repeatedly fly in and out of the eye of the storm, taking measurements all the time to determine whether it is gaining or losing strength and what direction it is taking. Satellite imagery provides forecasters some information from above, but it is only by flying into the middle of the storm that one can get any precise indication of temperature or pressure changes in the eye that can herald some change in the hurricane’s behavior. The National Hurricane Center reckons the hurricane hunter planes improve their forecasting accuracy by about 30 percent.

We took off from Homestead Air Force base south of Miami shortly before midday on Sunday, after a delay to wait for a lightning storm to pass over. Even though the planes can survive the fiercest hurricanes once airborne, no pilot likes to take off in a thunderstorm with its dangerous wind shear and sudden up-and-down drafts. Gustav wasn’t very far off the Florida coast, and within 45 minutes at 10,000 feet, we started to bump a little as we flew into the first “feeder bands” of rainfall that spiral out from the eye and cause most of the precipitation.

Soon we were just flying through white/gray vapor with water streaming down the windshield of the cockpit.  "Like going through a car wash,"  said Lt. Col. Dan Jones, who was the captain of the flight. As we approached the center of the storm, one of the crew back in the body of the plane began to fire out small tubular sensors called “sondes,” which have a self-opening parachute that lets them fall slowly through the storm, sending back a stream of data on wind speed, temperature, pressure and humidity.

The turbulence is not constant; it shows up on the Doppler Radio in a series of colors, from green through yellow and red, to the heaviest rag doll shaking in purple. You pretty much need to be strapped in for purple, or you risk body-slamming the roof. Fortunately on our flight, we didn’t have to fly through much purple. The eye of the storm was breaking down and reforming itself, a natural cycle that happens often as storms gain power, because they become inherently unstable.

When we broke into the eye we suddenly could see beyond the wing tips again. The center of a storm is quite calm, and we could see the ocean below and blue sky above us. The surface of the water was smeared with white, like an untidy painter’s palette: waves being blown over by the wind. The air crew can make a fairly good estimate of wind-speed at the surface based on the ratio of white to green on the water.

As we headed through the eye, we could see the opposite wall looming up in front of us, slate gray and unfriendly-looking. At one point our cameraman, who was crouching down to shoot through the cockpit window, was thrown up and down, ending up on his backside on the cabin floor, a sheepish grin across his face.

We made four passes through the eye. When a storm as big as Gustav approaches land, the hurricane hunters try to make a pass every two or three hours, and as one plane runs out of fuel and heads home, another plane is already taking off so they can keep up the pattern. The hurricane hunters will be the first to notice any change in the storm’s track, as they can pinpoint the exact center each time they pass through. This, in turn, helps emergency services on the ground who have to decide where evacuations should be carried out.

What was most interesting about the air crew was that they didn’t regard their job as particularly hazardous. "Flying a plane over Iraq is way more dangerous,” said Col. Jones with a smile. The planes can take the weather, and the major risk to the crew is getting caught in turbulence without being belted in. Many of them have families living along the Gulf Coast, so they have a personal investment in helping to plot the exact path of each storm they fly into.

After nine hours, we flew home.  I, for one, was glad to step off the plane onto the tarmac. But the crew was going to get some rest, and 12 hours later make another flight into the storm, which they follow all the way until it makes landfall. After that, the danger of tornadoes prevents them from tracking them over land: The concentrated energy of a tornado is one thing even the hurricane hunters don’t want to get sucked into. They may be a little crazy, but not that crazy.

September 5, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (2)

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Posted by: Dianne | Oct 21, 2008 10:12:19 AM

Posted by: Dianne | Feb 6, 2009 10:08:36 AM

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