TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE — Flying an airplane directly into the center of hurricane is a thing to behold, they say, but unless it's a big storm, like a Category 5, it's no big deal.
That was the consensus among the Hurricane Hunters, members of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, who invited reporters to take a rare peek at one of only 10 WC-130J aircraft in the Department of Defense's inventory with its flight crew.
"It's really nothing special," Aerial Reconnaissance Weather Officer Kait Woods said. "It's just like any C-130 out there. There's no special structural [enhancements]. It just has a couple instruments on the outside that are specifically for weather observation."
The 53rd WRS, according to an Air Force fact sheet, began in 1943 as a bar room challenge between two Army Air Corps daredevils. Maj. Joe Duckworth, in response to what must have been a double-dog dare from a drinking buddy who is not named in the fact sheet, flew twice through a hurricane in the same day in 1943.
Seventy years later, the five-person crews that follow in Duckworth's contrails aren't looking for thrills but scientific data that provides weather forecasters with critical information on potentially deadly storms as they approach.
Woods is a meteorologist, and she's in charge of directing the pilots into the eye of hurricanes. When the aircraft reaches the center of a storm, the loadmaster drops a parachute-equipped sensor about the size of a thermos called a dropsonde. The dropsonde gathers air pressure, temperature and wind data as it falls 10,000 feet to the ocean, and the crew monitors the data it collects in real time to make sure the data is accurate.
As storms approach a coast, the frequency of these data gathering operations intensifies, said Keith Gibson, the director of operations for the Hurricane Hunters.
"We'll have a plane in the eye 24-7 when storms make landfall," he said.
The data they gather is sent, almost in real time, to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Hurricane Center. Forecasters use the data to determine as much as they can about the storm, including where and when it might make landfall.
The hurricane center uses that information in order to issue their watches, warnings and advisories, and that cone of uncertainty that shows up on the news when storms approach would be perhaps 40 percent more uncertain without the Hurricane Hunters, Woods said.
Woods flew on an airplane directly into the eye of Hurricane Katrina, as she has with other storms since 2005, but her most harrowing experience in an airplane had nothing to do with hurricanes and actually occurred over the Midwest en route to Alaska.
"Most of the time, it's not as exciting as you might think it would be. In fact I think I've been on more scary commercial flights before," Woods said.
However, she added, "The eye is just unbelievable."