Behind The Wings

(expectant music) - Hi, I'm Tracy LaTourrette, call sign Jackie'O, Colorado's first lady fighter pilot.

We're here at Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum in Denver, Colorado.

We're getting an inside look at the Hurricane Hunters.

- Hurricanes cause the most damage, cost the most money.

- Trees coming down.

You might have roofs ripped off of homes.

- Hurricane Helene came through, and when I came home, my house on the lake was in the lake.

- The mission of hurricane hunting is to protect those folks that are in harm's way.

- Improved forecast has directly resulted in reduced loss of life.

- Nobody's flying into hurricanes for fun.

- We're essentially bringing the lab to the storm.

- Whenever you're in the storm, being on a wooden roller coaster in a car wash, you can't see, and you're getting bumped around everywhere.

(metal clanking) - Oh!

- Beautiful, terrifying, humbling, sad.

It's like all the human emotions kind of wrapped into one.

- You gotta understand the storm environment before being able to actually fly into 'em.

So the research part is extremely important.

- It's time to go "Behind the Wings."

(wind howling) (material clattering) Hurricanes are among the most destructive natural disasters on the planet.

With winds that can exceed 150 miles per hour, hurricanes flatten neighborhoods, topple trees and power poles, and trigger flooding, potentially injuring and killing victims in their path.

There's a group of aviators who risk their lives flying into hurricanes, extracting data from the eye of the storm to make it safer for those on the ground.

Hurricane Hunters fly not for the thrill but for the science, but they still appreciate the thrill.

- I think I'm at around 330 to 360 penetrations.

- [Tracy] Mac McAlister is responsible for the installation and mission readiness of the science systems onboard.

- A cat 5 is a monster.

We're pointing this direction, but we're flying this direction because such strong winds are coming from the side, some really wicked flights, and knowing that the information that we're collecting is saving lives, giving people early warning to get out.

To see the storms that close, it's beautiful and terrifying.

At the same time, you know the imminent danger that's coming to people, their homes, their lives, the things that people have worked for.

- [Tracy] Mac has the unique experience of flying into the hurricane's fury in the air and dealing with its destruction on the ground.

- I'd lived there for quite a few years.

It was a nice place on a lake here in town.

Hurricane Helene came through, and when I came home, my house on the lake was in the lake.

It's humbling to see the storms that close.

I sent a SOS out, and about 60 of the 90-plus people that work here all showed up in mass, moved my stuff out of my house.

To be a Hurricane Hunter and then to go through that, I know why it's important that we go do this work.

- We're in Lakeland, Florida at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Aircraft Operations Center, where science and danger meet head on in the heart of hurricane season.

Nikki Hathaway makes sure the Hurricane Hunters team is always ready for the next storm.

Why on earth would you want to fly into a hurricane anyway?

- The concept of flying to a hurricane might be a little crazy, but we're really doing it for the protection of life and property.

And the purpose behind where this crazy idea came from was the feeling of being behind the curve and getting hit with these storms.

People wanted more warning.

They wanted more direction and lead time to get ahead of the storms.

What are we missing?

What are we not collecting that could give us that forecast in a much smaller window than, "Hey, overnight you better be prepared, and it's supposed to be windy in the morning," like we had a couple decades ago.

- It began with a dare and a storm.

In 1943, as a powerful hurricane approached the Texas coast, Army Air Force's pilot Joe Duckworth climbed into a T-6 Texan training aircraft and flew straight into the eye.

It was the first time anyone had intentionally flown into a hurricane.

That single flight marked the birth of what we now call the Hurricane Hunters.

At first, these flights were experimental, but by the 1950s, they became an essential part of the US weather surveillance system.

Today two organizations carry that mission forward, the US Air Force Reserve and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

- The mission of hurricane hunting is to protect those folks that are in harm's way, these large weather phenomenon that come and bring lots of rain, flooding, storm surge, obviously the winds.

So growing up in Tampa, this was something that I was always intrigued by, is these big weather phenomena that would come on and cause no school days back when I was, you know, in elementary school.

Why can't I go to school?

'Cause you have a hurricane coming, and you had to take cover and be prepared with your families.

These storms can develop very quickly.

We've seen them obviously spin up a lot faster, and we need a way to track 'em and monitor 'em.

There's really just no way of getting that data in the storm environment across the Atlantic Ocean without putting aircraft in them.

- [Tracy] NOAA's aircraft of choice is the WP-3D Orion, a modified Navy patrol plane built for science and survival.

NOAA flies dozens of missions each hurricane season across the Atlantic, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean Sea and around the world.

- Here at the NOAA Aircraft Operation Center, we have two different types of aircraft that fly the Hurricane Hunter missions.

The one behind us is the WP-3D.

We have two of these.

This one is N42 or Kermit.

The other one is N43, Miss Piggy.

And then our high-flying G4 jet is Gonzo.

So they're all named after the Muppets.

Both aircraft have different purposes and objectives in terms of what type of data they're collecting within the hurricane environment.

- And tell me about some of the science that makes your P-3s special.

- Sure, I mean, well, just even looking from this angle, the tail doppler radar, it's on the back of the aircraft, almost looks like a stinger.

It really is a phenomenal piece of instrumentation.

So we have three different types of radar on board our aircraft, and this is the only one that's scanning vertically.

And so you can almost imagine like beetle wings going up and down, and it's able to capture the data in a very different way than the other two types of radar do.

And that data is able to be digested by the computer models now, which is a more recent advancement and has really helped get the models to initialize with additional data that you just didn't have before, whether that be wind speed or rain rate, which is quite phenomenal.

- We have a lot to look at.

Let's go take a closer look.

So this is the multi-mode radar.

So we technically call it the MMR, but we otherwise nickname it as a big, black M&M.

So it's also very unique.

This one's scanning on a X-Y plane if you're thinking about your different frame of references.

So the great thing about the multi-mode radar is you're able to capture this 360-degree view.

You're really able to see what's in front of you as well as what's behind you, which could be really critical inside the eye of the storm specifically.

There are times that you get into a hurricane, and the diameter of the eye is very small, maybe four nautical miles.

And so you need to know quickly where your exit point could be, and sometimes it's behind you.

Sometimes it's popping a U-ey and going back out the way you came in.

And this is the instrument that really gives us that additional perspective versus our nose radar or our tail radar.

- Let's keep the tour going.

- Sure, there's so many different types of probes that we have hanging off of our aircraft.

It's things like flight level data that's actually really critical to the Hurricane Hunter mission.

Considering wind speed, pressure, temperature, all those things are vital to be able to finding the center of the storm.

- What are these golden nuggets hanging off the wing over here?

- Oh that's just some of Kermit's, you know, favorite instrumentation.

So what we have here our cloud microphysics probes.

So we have three specifically to make the entire set, all kind of measuring different types of things within the actual tropical cyclone environment.

People might think, "Oh, you must only be flying through water or rain," but the reality is is there's lots of tiny little microparticles at the cloud level that the scientists are able to analyze.

So this is just one of those instruments that's able to get a closer picture in terms of what those particles look like inside the storm.

So it's a huge instrument for the research community to really understand better the microphysics of a tropical cyclone.

- I'm glad to know you guys are out there on the front lines hunting these hurricanes.

- Absolutely, you know, when the storm calls, the team will be ready to dispatch no matter where it's at and collect the data that's needed.

And we're collecting datasets that really no other types of instruments can collect.

You just can't get the same type of data when you're flying through a cross section of a hurricane at eight to 12,000 feet with these WP-3Ds that you can with like a satellite, for example.

We're flying in, and our WP-3Ds are marking the center of the storm.

- [Tracy] Hurricanes are categorized based on wind speed from category 1 to category 5.

- At a basic level, a hurricane is a specific class of what we call a tropical cyclone.

So a cyclone's an area of low pressure.

You see those on the weather map every day.

What makes hurricanes different and all tropical cyclones different is they get their energy from the warm ocean and then turning that heat into energy that gets released by showers and thunderstorms.

So you develop a positive feedback cycle, essentially, where the winds blowing over the warm ocean water pull more of that heat up into the atmosphere, and the storm continues to develop.

They have a very intense inner core, and you've seen an eye of a hurricane on satellite imagery.

That eye may only be a few miles across, and within that eyewall, that area right outside the edge of the eye, is where the strongest winds tend to be.

But it's really the water hazards that are the most dangerous.

When you think about what kills the most people in tropical storms and hurricanes, in the last nine or 10 years in the United States, it's been rainfall flooding.

The other big water hazard is called storm surge, and that's where the winds of the hurricane basically push ocean water up onto areas of normally dry land.

It's not like filling up a bathtub slowly.

It's a very violent push of ocean water that comes inland very quickly, maybe in the matter of minutes to hours, with dangerous waves breaking on top of that.

We lose a lot of people in those events who wait too long to try to evacuate.

The water starts to rise, and they can't get out.

When you're in the area of where a major hurricane is making landfall, you're gonna hear, you know, trees coming down.

You might have roofs ripped off of homes, structural damage, projectiles flying through the air.

It's just a very dangerous environment to be in.

Cars floating away.

It can destroy your home, move your home off its foundation.

Conditions get dangerous very, very quickly.

- So your mission is hurricane hunting, but you have a lot more going on on this platform.

Tell me about the science.

- You gotta understand the storm environment before being able to actually fly into 'em.

So the research part is extremely important.

The WP-3D being one of the flying science labs that we have here at the Aircraft Operations Center, it has a ton of different types of probes and radars and different types of instruments hanging off to be able to sample different datasets that you just really can't sample in any other way.

We're able to launch drones as well.

A lot of research has been done in the drone environment, sampling parts of the storm that truly the aircraft can't get to.

Within the boundary layer, the smallest layer right off the ocean surface, just the first few thousand feet within the storm, the type of things we would experience in terms of weather once it makes landfall, we're using drones now to capture data within that environment.

Flying science lab, lots of different types of data is being collected and measured for both operational and research purposes.

- Lieutenant Commander Chris Wood pilots NOAA's P-3 Orion straight into the eye of the storm.

Chris, how do you like flying the P-3 Orion?

Does it perform well for this mission?

- It's really a pilot's aircraft, right?

There's not a ton of automation, so you really have to be hands-on with the aircraft the entire time you're flying it.

This is really a like bare-bones, back-to-basics, six pack-style of flying.

- The P-3 was originally made to be a Navy aircraft.

What modifications have been done to make it a Hurricane Hunter?

- Our specific P-3s here are based off of the Charlie model of the Navy's P-3.

We have done some additional work on the wing roots to make those more structurally sound so they're capable of resisting the impactful g-forces that we're gonna get that are gonna be caused by the turbulence.

The engines on this are unique as well, with a more efficient power profile than the standard Allison T56s.

- It sounds like a great platform for the mission.

Can we take a closer look?

What makes this a better platform than, say, a jet engine?

- Propeller-driven aircraft and in particular this style of propeller-driven aircraft, which actually has a physical shaft between the engine and the propeller, have a lot of advantages over, you know, jet engines or even free turbine-style propeller aircraft.

We can get instantaneous power whenever we need to make changes in the storm environment.

It's very dynamic.

We're trying to maintain the aircraft in a very like narrow speed range.

There's no spool-up time.

There's no lead-in time.

By the time those things would happen on a jet engine or a free turbine-style aircraft, it would already be too late.

- I imagine these aircraft take a beating flying in the middle of hurricanes as their mission.

- Our maintainers do a really excellent job of keeping these aircraft airborne and completely 100% operational at all times.

Anything that we're doing in the aircraft, we're taking maintainers with us, and they're gonna be working well before we actually show up to the aircraft and well after we get back to make sure that everything is good, everything is serviced, everything is in tip-top shape.

- All right, so that's the walk-around, but everyone knows the pilot's office is in the cockpit.

Let's go.

Chris, I'm a single-seat, single-engine background.

You have a lot more going on in this cockpit.

Give me a tour.

- We operate with a minimum of three people up here in the flight station whenever we're flying this aircraft.

So there's gonna be the two pilots, and then we're gonna have a flight engineer sit-ted here.

Everybody's working in tandem as a crew in order to actually operate this aircraft, so the pilots are gonna be controlling the aircraft as you would expect using the controls.

The flight engineer is our systems expert, and they're gonna be monitoring the health and the status of everything in the aircraft while we're flying it.

And in the storm environment, they're actually gonna be controlling the engines as well because it will take both pilots just to make sure that we can maintain this aircraft in the very narrow attitude range that we need to have it in there.

This aircraft is fairly old.

It's almost 50 years old at this point.

If you look around, you can kind of see that '70s heritage that's apparent from when it was made.

Walking through the aircraft itself, all of the different flight instruments are right here.

It's not laid out like a traditional six pack, but it effectively is.

We have an air speed.

We have our altimeter.

We have a VSI, attitude indicator, all this stuff that you would expect from that kind of system.

We have a radar display here for the nose radar.

This iPad here actually works as a display to give us the information that the flight director who's in the back is capable of seeing.

So they can broadcast that up here for us to view as well.

And then we have controls for some of the other stuff that's going on here.

So this is for the MMR itself.

We can raise and lower it to give a little extra clearance from the aircraft to help that radar out.

The fuel system is here, so we do have the four engines.

Each has their own fuel tank, and then there's one belly tank as well.

The engines and everything that's going on with them, including shaft, horsepower, fuel flow, and all the kind of stuff that you would normally be monitoring, would be displayed here on those couple center panels there.

Looking up, there's a lot going on, but this is just some more of the aircraft systems.

So all of our bleed air control is gonna be in here.

Anti-ice and all of our ice-protection controls are gonna be here.

Everybody has to work together as a unit and as a team in order to be able to actually make this mission work.

- So you have the two Orions, but you have a lot of other aircraft here at NOAA.

What else are you guys flying?

- After the storm makes landfall, we have other aircraft that really do important missions too.

Our Twin Otter and our King Air are two other aircraft that we fly on the lights.

The King Air has a mission where they'll go out and do emergency response, for example, for FEMA.

So they do coastal mapping year-round, as well as the Otter, and take images along the coast to really understand what it looks like prior destruction.

And then after a storm makes landfall, they're able to go back and take those after-the-storm images.

And those are some of the times the first way that people know if their home still stands, is by those images getting posted online and folks able to dive into that data footage and see what the images look post-destruction.

As important as it is to capture the internal dynamics of a tropical cyclone, that's what our P-3s are really doing at that lower level, eight to 12,000 feet, your G4 jet is up there capturing the upper levels of the atmosphere that also play a huge role and influence the actual storm itself.

So that's how the two missions play really critical, one more focused on maybe the intensity and what type of internal dynamics we should be focused on, the P-3s, and then the G4 being that overall larger landscape and the envelope around the storm itself.

Hurricanes obviously don't sleep, so we're flying these things around the clock 24/7.

And so you'll see oftentimes every six hours a different squadron in the storm environment capturing different fixes.

So they'll be in the center at zero Zulu, and we'll be in that six Zulu and then 12 Zulu, so forth.

So we do work together just to make sure that the entire lifecycle of the hurricane is covered, and we can't do it without each other.

So we'll use our flight director.

The meteorologist will use the winds to help navigate and guide pilots as to where the actual center of the storm is, mark the center, and continue outbound.

That's one of the purposes of flying to a hurricane.

Satellites, radars, just can't do that.

You're also out there doing research.

We're able to drop things like dropsondes, drones, different types of research instrumentation we fly on our wings.

They collect a whole different type of dataset that allows us to better the forecast of hurricane forecasting for the year still to come.

And all that data is packaged up and collected and put into a vortex data message that then gets transferred to the National Hurricane Center.

- Without the aircraft data and without the understanding of what's going on in that environment, we wouldn't be able to make those more accurate and aggressive forecasts.

And then that's so important because it sets the stage for what sort of hazards people need to prepare for.

Improved forecast has directly resulted in reduced loss of life, especially from the storm surge hazard in recent years.

The Hurricane Hunter data go in at the beginning of the process.

The initial injection of that important information into the beginning of the forecast process, it helps make the forecast that come out of the hurricane center more accurate.

So that gets all the way down to the end of the chain to where what are people actually doing on the ground to help keep themselves safe.

- [Tracy] Robbie Berg interprets the data and provides essential forecasts to local weather teams.

- It's near instantaneous that what they're seeing, what they're observing, what they're measuring, is getting directly back to the forecaster.

Without the Hurricane Hunters actually flying into storms, there would be a lot more guessing going on.

The models, the forecasting, it's improving, but we still need people to be prepared before a storm threatens.

Hurricanes are a big deal.

They are one of the biggest natural disasters that we experience.

They cause the most damage, cost the most money.

Experiencing a hurricane can have lasting impacts on your family, on your life.

You think about if you live in a house that's right along the coast, and it gets gutted by storm surge, you may have lost everything.

And that's gonna take a long time to recover, not just with the stuff you'd lost in the house, but think about emotionally and mentally.

It takes a toll on somebody's life in how they see the world and how they're able to move through the world.

- Before takeoff, every mission begins with the flight brief.

It's all about risk mitigation, precision, and teamwork.

- All right, good morning, everybody sitting down for our first flight into this category 5 storm.

Expendable loads, we have 40 sondes on board the plane right now, four BTs, one MicroSWIFT buoy.

And the storm, it's now cat 5.

The Air Force measured about 148 knots at flight level 10,000 last night.

Right now it's at 17.3 north, 52.4 west.

Air Force did report a rough ride, lots of lightning.

I'll show you on the satellite imagery.

It's compacted to the north.

Wild rides can be expected.

Onboard total crew today is 14.

This is the mission profile.

We'll be coming in from the southwest.

Our normal pass for the first leg, just our regular sondes, your IP, midpoint, radius to max winds, center drop, and then the exit.

The Air Force will be out there with us.

They're taking off an hour and 15 minutes after us.

I think our first pass can be at 10,000 feet.

Looking at our satellite imagery here, as I said, a lot of that lightning in the northern eyewall.

It's gonna be pretty wet.

I think there's gonna be a lot of water.

Turbulence, per usual as a hurricane flight, light to moderate, plus in storm, especially on that northern part of the eyewall.

That is the brief.

- All right, I think that's everything, guys, so we'll plan to meet out at the plane.

We'll do the plane side about 30 minutes before we take off.

So just everybody be at the ladder at that time, and then we'll get ready to go.

(solemn determined music) (engines humming) - The Hurricane Hunters are spinning up and ready for takeoff.

(airplane humming) This team flies straight into the world's most dangerous storms on purpose.

- Hurricane season operations day in, day out can be quite exhausting.

We're flying day and night around the clock 24/7, and sometimes, depending on the lifecycle of the storm, this can go for seven days on end.

It's a pretty taxing job in terms of just the overall expectation of the crew.

- Every time we go up, you're looking at an eight-hour flight.

It's typically between anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours before we reach a storm.

And once we get there, we try to do a minimum of two passes through the storm so we can at least get two center fixes of that storm.

We need a center fix at a minimum on that storm every six hours.

So it's a concerted effort between the National Hurricane Center of Miami scheduling both the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron out of Biloxi, Mississippi, the Air Force Reserves, and the NOAA Air Operations Center's two WP-3D Orion aircraft to start observing the storm and tracking it as it moves through.

- Pilots, scientists, and meteorologists huddle around realtime storm data, planning every turn, every drop, every second inside the storm.

- It's 100% a team effort to fly this airplane.

Outside of just the cockpit itself, we're coordinating with everybody in the back who's providing the updated information, the scientific objectives, the storm motion, and everything else like that, to get a full picture of what we're gonna do and how we're gonna enter it.

We'll generally have one hurricane-qualified aircraft commander like myself who will be sitting in the right seat, and they're gonna basically be monitoring and running the show, backing everybody up on what's going on, calling out any deviations, anything that's coming up, and making any sort of time-critical decisions that have to happen.

The pilot, who's sitting where I am right now, is actually gonna be in control of the aircraft and making sure that they're flying those directed headings, tracking like they're supposed to be doing, maintaining the attitude of the aircraft with the backup of the aircraft commander.

The flight engineer in that moment is gonna be monitoring all of the instrumentation in this cockpit as well as maintaining the speed of the aircraft through the control of the power levers.

And so they're trying to maintain in a very-narrow, only 20 knots' difference between too fast and too slow when we're in the storm environment, and that can happen in a heartbeat.

- Flying in the middle of a hurricane, I would think disorientation and unusual attitudes are a real concern.

- So there's a lot of feelings whenever you're in the storm.

Being on a wooden roller coaster in a car wash, you can't see, and you're getting bumped around everywhere, right?

So it can be very disorienting.

When we're flying into the hurricane, we're generally targeting an altitude somewhere between eight and 12,000 feet, where 10,000 feet is really the sweet spot.

And that helps us balance out turbulence, which gets worse the lower you go, and any sort of freezing ice graupel effects that you have that you get higher in the storm.

The flight station works with the flight director to sort of manage and mitigate and come up with a plan for any sort of the scientific objectives.

- This is the flight director station.

There is quite a few monitors up here.

So this is the MMR, the multi-mode radar.

This is our 360 horizontal view of radar.

It's the big M&M on the bottom of the aircraft.

And it also helps me make my decisions as far as to turn around or to keep going, or this is gonna be bumpy.

Let's buckle up.

So when we fly out to the storm, we're essentially bringing the lab to the storm.

And so sometimes the scientists will want a specific project.

Say, for example, they want to do a microphysics spiral.

And that just means we spiral all the way up to 20,000 feet, and then we spiral back down.

Pilots wanna be close to the eye.

Scientists just wanna get the spiral.

We meet in the middle.

That's where I come in.

I can see that on the MMR, and I can point them in that direction.

- We were up against some major science objectives.

The eye started at 20 miles across, and when we got in the eye, on our radar systems on the plane, every time, the radar scope, you could watch it sweep around, we lost a mile, 20, 19, 18, 17.

The eye went down to a 10-mile eye wide, and we're still banked inside the eye in the lesser winds.

When we went in, we took probably one of the worst hits I've ever seen.

We experienced an extreme amount of gs.

I remember them saying we were 81 degrees bank, and we lost 2,500 feet in about one second.

Got through the other side and repositioned, and we looked at the crew, we looked at the people, and said, "We're ready to go back in."

By the time we're almost done flying another series, in mid-flight, we get word, "Hey, when you guys get back to the hotel, pack up.

You guys are going back to Lakeland 'cause there's this other storm that you gotta start flying at."

Beautiful, terrifying, humbling, sad, it's like all the human emotions kind of wrapped into one in one day.

- The satisfaction that we get from our jobs, I think most of my team would agree, is so much so there.

You'll come home after flying a mission, and you will quite literally see the track change from the National Hurricane Center because of the data that was just collected by either ourselves or the Air Force Squadron almost immediately with the next computer model run.

So it's quite rewarding and just satisfying to know that we're putting ourselves through these strenuous flights to make sure that the people are getting what they need to stay safe.

Our entire job is essentially pointless if the public isn't really taking into consideration firsthand what the emergency managers are saying are the biggest impacts that they can expect at their home.

Nobody's flying into hurricanes for fun.

These people here are getting the data and flying into the environments that they fly through for the people back at home to be able to heed warning and take into consideration what decisions they need to make for their families when something like a category 5 hurricane is headed their way.

- Where do you see Hurricane Hunters evolving in the future?

- The evolution of hurricane hunting in the future, we've been launching a lot of drones, a lot of unmanned aerial systems into the storms.

There's some systems on the aircraft that are the next generation of what's going on, the next satellites up there.

What's currently up there on the satellites used to be on these aircraft.

They get test-vetted, fitted on these aircraft, flown in storm environments, proven, and then put up in space.

We're flying some really old aircraft, but they're very well-maintained aircraft.

We have a couple of C-130s in the works to replace our aging aircraft.

They're reaching the end of their lifecycle.

It's only gonna get better, and it's only gonna get safer for the future Hurricane Hunters.

But for now, we've got some new aircraft coming in and continual emerging technologies.

– The mission has always been the same: understand the storm, improve the forecast, and help protect lives.

And today, with hurricanes growing stronger and intensifying faster than ever before, the mission has never been so urgent.

We'll see you next time on "Behind the Wings."

(determined upbeat music) (determined upbeat music continues)