While the president of the United States and the governor of Florida were urging millions of people to evacuate from their homes when hurricane Milton was looking like it could be one of the worst ever to hit the Florida coast, a small band of professionals were heading in the opposite direction and directly into the eye of the storm.
These are the hurricane hunters of NOAA and the US Air Force but what does it take to fly into the most violent storms on the planet and why with the advent of weather satellites, supercomputers and other monitoring systems do we still need to fly men and aircraft into these highly dangerous situations where every other aircraft on the planet would be giving it a very wide berth indeed.
In some parts of the world hurricanes, typhoons or tropical cyclones which are all the same, only name changes depending on where they occur, are just a way of life and coming at certain times of the year.
For Hurricanes that form in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and eastern Pacific, but like all natural systems they are not bound by manmade calendars and can occur earlier or later.
Hurricanes start off as clusters of clouds over the warm tropical oceans which amalgamate and then start to rotate to form tropical depressions. When the sustained wind speeds reach 39 mph or 63 km/h its classed is a tropical storm, when they reach 74 mph or 120km/h it’s classed as a hurricane. Hurricanes have five categories with one being the lowest and five being the highest and most powerful.
With climate change and sea temperatures rising, the increased amount of evaporation and water vapour in the atmosphere, the strength of hurricanes has been increasing over the last the last decade or so.
When hurricane Milton formed it went from a tropical storm to a category 5 in less than a day because of last year’s El Nino and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico were at the highest temperature they’ve ever been and defying the meteorologists that thought it would die out before becoming a hurricane, let alone a category 5 one.
With more heat energy in the sea, accurately predicting the path and strength of hurricanes has become increasingly difficult, even with weather satellites and supercomputer modelling.
The most accurate way to work out what a hurricane may do is to actually fly through the outer rain bands and into the eye of the storm taking measurements along the way and sending them back to NOAA headquarters to make more accurate forecasts of its path and strength.
However, unlike flying through normal clouds, not only are there extremely powerful updrafts and downdrafts the closer you get to the eye, there is also torrential rain, hail, lightning and even tornadoes making it not only extremely stressful for the pilots but also for the structure of the aircraft themselves.
But once they get to the eye, which can be from about 15 miles down to around about 3 miles in diameter, the air is still and there are no clouds, this gives him a rest bite and allows the crews and aircraft to ready themselves for the exit back out through the eyewall.
The first time an aircraft was used to locate hurricane was in Sept 1935 which became the great Labor Day hurricane, the most powerful to hit the US for decades to come and is still classed as the 3rd most intense on record.
An aircraft from the Cuban Army was flown by an American expat, Captain Leonard Povey who volunteered to see if the storm was a threat to the capital of Cuba. The aircraft was an open cockpit Curtis Hawk II and didn’t fly into the storm because of this but afterwards, he did recommend that an ariel hurricane patrol be set up. However, this didn’t happen but the “Storm Patrol Bill” was passed in the United States Senate and House of Representatives in June 1936 which would eventually lead the way to the formation of the official hurricane hunters.
The first time an aircraft was deliberately flown into a hurricane was not part of any research but actually a barroom dare between two army air core pilots in July 1943.
Major Joe Duckworth flew a single-engine, propeller-driven North American AT-6 “Texan” trainer into the eye of a category one hurricane twice on the 27th of July 1943. The first time with a navigator and then again with a weather officer, this has become known as the first attempt to obtain information to plot the position of a hurricane as it approached land.
This proved that you could fly into a hurricane and come out the other side in one piece and set the stage for further flights for research into tropical cyclones.
By 1944 the 53rd WRS or weather reconnaissance squadron also known as the “hurricane hunters” was set up to track weather in the North Atlantic between North America and Europe.
During and after the war a variety of usually four-engine aircraft were used including consolidated B-24 liberators, Boeing B17 flying fortresses, North American B-25, Boeing B29 and B-50s.
These were loaded up with test equipment and flown into hurricanes regularly. But this was still early days and up until 1958, five hurricane hunter aircraft were lost during these missions.
All but one, a Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer, a version of the B-24 Liberator which crashed on Baton Island whilst trying to make an emergency landing in hurricane conditions, were never seen again and all the crews, a total of 46 people were lost.
The only aircraft to be lost more recently was in October 1974 when a Lockheed WC-130 Hercules went down on its second approach into the eye of Typhoon Bess near the Philippines. No emergency transmissions were sent and the aircraft and its crew of 6 could not be located and remains the only WC-130 lost in a storm.
As a mark of respect, the name Bess was removed from the active list of typhoon names. Since then no Hurricane Hunter aircraft have been lost but the have been some close calls.
But it wasn’t just multi-engine ex-bombers that were used. Between 1960 and 1968, U2 spy planes were used to fly over the top of hurricanes and typhoons at between 45,000 and 70,000 feet to check for levels of ozone and how the storm affected wind strengths at these very high altitudes.
In 1970 NOAA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was formed and this took on the monitoring of weather events including tropical cyclones for civilian purposes.
Currently, NOAA operates two Lockheed WP 3Ds, highly modified versions of the Lockheed P3 Orion which are nicknamed Miss Piggy and Kermit with the call signs NOAA 42 and NOAA 43.
To see the weather in more detail as they fly into the Hurricanes they use three weather radars, a C band radar on the nose and lower fuselage and a Doppler radar on the aircraft’s tail. They also use a barber pole sampler, named for the red and white striped pole that protrudes from the front of the aircraft.
The fuselage is also strengthened to handle the extra load from the equipment installed.
One of the most accurate ways to monitor the conditions is to deploy drop sondes, a tube-like device which uses a parachute to slow its descent through storm conditions until it hits the sea or the ground.
On the way down they measure pressure, temperature, and humidity and contain a GPS receiver to plot the height and position of the data recorded. This is relayed back to the aircraft via radio. In a typical hurricane season, they will drop between 1000 and 1500 sondes during training and storm missions.
Both Lockheed WC-130 and the WP-3D are propeller-driven aircraft, the reason for this is that propellers are more resistant to hail than fan blades in jet engines and are less likely to be damaged. They are regularly hit by the frequent lightning in the storm and are adapted to protect monitoring equipment and onboard computers.
They are also both four-engine aircraft, this is because not only do they need the redundancy that four engines provide but also the power to be able to fly out of tricky situations if they’re caught in extreme up or down draughts.
This was proved when NOAA 42 was investigating Hurricane Hugo in September 1989.
On route to the hurricane, two of the three aircraft’s radar systems went offline, this left them without vital information but as the hurricane was only expected to be a category one or two, so they decided to fly in at 1500 feet instead of the 5000 feet if it had been a more powerful storm.
This gives them more room to handle downdrafts which if they are flying too low could push them into the sea. If possible they will fly in the lowest cloud area because this is where the strongest winds are and the best measurements will be obtained.
By the time the radar was fixed some 20-odd minutes later they were flying into the first spiral band near the eye and radar images still matched their category one or two expectations, so they carried on in at 1500 feet.
However, by the time they hit the eyewall things changed very rapidly as they hit severe turbulence and torrential rain, then just when they thought they were coming through the eyewall into the centre, they were hit by tremendous up and down draughts creating the largest ever recorded G forces experienced by a P-3 with 5.5G upwards and 3.5G downwards, damaging the number three engine so it had to be shut down and causing the de-icing boot on #4 to become dislodged.
Hugo wasn’t the Category 1 or 2 they first thought, it was actually a Category 5 and became the most costly to hit the US up until that time.
It also forced them down to just 720 feet above the sea and with one engine not working they had to dump fuel to try and lighten up the aircraft so they could climb but could only get to 7500ft .
Inside the cabin, everything that wasn’t bolted down including a 200lb life raft became airborne causing a lot of damage inside but luckily no one was injured.
As they circled within the eye they were assisted by Noah 43 which was flying at 20,000 feet and Teal 57, a USAF C-130 reconnaissance airplane sent into the storm by the National Hurricane Center to provide information on Hugo’s position and intensity.
As Noah 42 flew around the inside of the 12-mile diameter eye, teal 57 flew above and below to check for damage, then probed the eyewall to find areas with the weakest winds so Noah 42 could fly out with just three engines.
After the mission had gotten back to base and the data had been analysed, they realised that NOAA 42 had been hit by until then, unseen vortices or tornadoes in the eyewall, something which had been predicted but never seen on a mission.
This gives us an idea as to why some of the previous hurricane hunters may have been lost.
The up-and-down draughts were so strong and sudden that they could have caused structural failure or could have been forced into the sea if they were flying in low and didn’t have the time or power to pull up.
Noah 42 was lucky to get away with what happened but it was still put out of action for the rest of the hurricane season while it was checked for damage and went through a three-month-long maintenance overhaul but no hurricane damage was found other than the detached de-icing boot on #4 and a failed fuel control sensor on #3 and the aircraft is still flying missions today.
The Lockheed WP-3D’s are getting on a bit now and are due to be replaced by modified C-130J’s by 2030 similar to those used by the USAF 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron.
These are not only more modern but faster have a greater takeoff weight and can take off and land from short runways if required in an emergency and can stay in the air for almost 18 hours at a cruise speed of more than 300 mph, although the Air Force versions usually fly at 10,000 feet through hurricanes rather than the lower 1500 to 5000 feet of a NOAA aircraft.
But between 2015 and 2017 both aircraft received major overhauls costing a total of $35 million, this work included new wings, engines and upgraded radars and avionics, with these improvements NOAA believes the aircraft can now fly up until 2037.
One thing is for sure though and that is that as the climate becomes more unstable, these aircraft and crews will become more important in the monitoring and prediction of the most destructive storms on earth.
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