Hunting hurricanes
Teamwork, skills needed to pierce eye of hurricane
Daniel Kelinske takes his son Ethan, 3, to learn about a Hurricane Hunter Lockheed Martin WC-130J Weatherbird on Tuesday at Scholes International Airport in Galveston. The aircraft was on display as part of a tour organized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to increase awareness of hurricanes and how to prepare for them.
GALVESTON — Capt. Kendall Dunn was flying his first mission into a storm as a member of the U.S. Air Force Reserve’s Hurricane Hunters squadron when the aircraft stopped responding and began to stall in a fierce cyclone.
A wrong move could have made Dunn’s first flight his last.
Dunn was one of at least eight Hurricane Hunter members at Scholes International Airport in Galveston on Tuesday to show off the sturdy Lockheed Martin WC-130J Weatherbird aircraft that they fly through hurricanes and tropical storms to gather information for the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
The aircraft was on display as part of a hurricane awareness tour organized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center. The aim is to increase awareness about the destructive force of hurricanes and how to prepare for them. Hurricane season officially begins June 1.
Dunn, 41, of Long Beach, Miss., was flying Black Hawk helicopters in the U.S. Army Reserve when he met a group of Hurricane Hunter pilots. The chance meeting convinced him that he needed to become a pilot in the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. He transferred to the Air Force Reserve and was retrained.
‘Training takes over’
On his first trip through a storm, Dunn flew from the Hurricane Hunters’ home at Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss., along the Gulf Coast. The WC130J ran directly into a mesocyclone, a whirlwind that often gives birth to tornadoes.
Mesocyclones spin at up to 100 mph and can send an aircraft plummeting into the ground by reversing the airflow, taking away the flow that lifts the wings. Without lift, the controls went dead, and the Weatherbird began turning to the left in what could quickly become a death spiral.
Dunn pushed the aircraft into a dive in the hope of gaining more lift by hitting the mesocyclone. They were flying at only 1,000 feet when they hit it.
Dunn said there was no time to worry about dying. “The training takes over,” Dunn said. “You just do it.”
The dive gave the lift they needed, and they flew out of the storm.
The Weatherbird has five crew members: pilot, copilot, navigator, weather officer and loadmaster. There are a little more than 100 members of the Hurricane Hunter squadron.
Maj. Kelly Soich, 45, of Houston, is a navigator, and his job is to make sure pilots like Dunn don’t run into mesocyclones, or even worse, one of the numerous waterspouts and tornado-like vortexes that are constantly forming and disintegrating inside a hurricane. Vortexes can spin at hundreds of miles per hour.
“I’ve never hit one, but I’ve come close because they are so hard to see,” Soich said.
The moment everyone on the aircraft looks forward to is when they break through the storm wall into the eye of the storm. “It’s an incredible sight,” Soich said.
Storm clouds tower thousands of feet on all sides, a blue sky above and the ocean below.
Very experienced
Once they find the windless, dead center, Sr. Master Sgt. Jay Latham, the loadmaster, loads a spring-loaded cannon with small tubes, known as dropsonde, packed with instruments. Latham fires the tubes out the bottom of the aircraft. Parachutes open and they drift away, taking readings that are radioed to instruments until they land in the ocean, where the water destroys their electrical system.
Going into the jaws of a hurricane takes experience and teamwork.
“It takes a very experienced crew to make this work easily,” Latham said. “It takes two to three years before guys are up to speed.”