Hurricane Hunters faced a grueling pace in 2020
Before dawn on Oct. 27 of last year, Lt. Col. Mark Withee and four crewmates climbed on board an Air Force Reserve WC-130J “Hurricane Hunter” aircraft, and took off from Mississippi’s Keesler Air Force Base. They were on their way to explore Tropical Storm Zeta in the Gulf of Mexico, on what was a record-setting flight.
It wasn’t the storm, but rather their final destination that made the flight so unusual. Instead of heading back to Keesler, the plane landed at a base in San Antonio, Texas. For the fourth time that season the Hurricane Hunters had to evacuate their home base because of the threat of a hurricane there, which is believed to be the highest number of base evacuations in the squadron’s history.
“We’ve never been at this level of activity, to repeatedly hurrevac this frequently,” Withee, a navigator who is also in charge of planning the evacuations, said in an interview.
Amid a tumultuous year involving a pandemic, wildfires and heat waves, 2020 brought the most active Atlantic hurricane season since record-keeping began. There were so many tropical storms and hurricanes, the World Meteorological Organization ran out of names and had to resort to letters from the Greek Alphabet for just the second time.
The 53rd was pushed to the limits of its operational parameters. In late August, hunters flew missions in three simultaneous hurricanes, the most they are allowed to perform at one time, according to Lt. Col Marnee Losurdo, a spokesperson for the 403rd Air Wing, which commands the squadron.
The 53rd flew 146 missions for a total of 1,364 flight hours, making 2020 the third-busiest season in squadron history. The second-busiest was 2005. The busiest season on record was 1969, before there was extensive satellite coverage and forecasters relied on planes for almost all of their tropical cyclone information.
Even now, in the era of sophisticated computer modeling and satellite monitoring, the Hurricane Hunters are in demand because in-situ data is impossible to get any other way.