|
[tag:breadcrumbs]
Houston Airport System
October 12, 2006
|
People call them hurricane hunters, but for the members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the adventure of tracking storms is simply a part of the job.
With the help of their trusty aircraft, named after a famous Hollywood starlet, the crew regularly pierces through hurricanes in an effort to better understand them. Recently Ms. Piggy was spotted soaking up some sunshine on the tarmac of Ellington Field.
Not the puppet version but the famed “Hurricane Hunter” airplane named for her.
The111-foot long, W P-3 D Orion turbo prop airplane, with the 100 foot wingspan, darts into the most vicious of storms, hurricanes, including Rita, last year. |
|
© Houston Airport System
Ms. Piggy was a star at Ellington Field recently when she visited the airport. |
Crew Chief Randy Mitchell remembers it vividly.
“As far as hurricanes are concerned, it’s the worst, the sharpest; let me put it that way, the sharpest turbulence I’ve ever experienced,” he recalled. “It was bad enough that the aircraft commander said that we had overstressed the aircraft and we had to go home…it’s like somebody just comes up and slugs you unexpectedly, I mean this one was.”
Mitchell describes the Rita flight, as he works on the 30-year old marvel of technology, parked at Ellington Field. He patiently explains the vertical Doppler radar in the tail, which checks a 45-mile radius, then on to the horizontally scanning Sea-band radar in the nose; that provides 200-mile surveillance.
He finishes up with the Step Frequency Microwave Radiometer or “Smurf”, which gages and determines wind speed at the ocean surface. This flying instrument and computer lab slices and dices through the storms, spitting out data and details about the atmospheric beasts known as hurricanes.
The crew chief says the idea is to get in and out of a hurricane quickly and safely.
“If the eye-wall itself as we’re approaching it, and where we’re heading through, looks rather ominous, we make adjustments before we get there,” he explained. “There comes a point in time when you can’t make adjustments. You don’t want to be turning the aircraft and tipping the wings up in the highest of the wind speeds.
I mean it could actually take the plane over. We try to keep the wings and level and sometime, even when you know you’re in a bad spot, the quickest and fastest way out is to go straight through it.”
Mitchell has flown 204 so-called, hurricane penetrations. There’s an insignia for each one of them on the tail of this aircraft.
Missions begin 24-36 hours before a hurricane is scheduled to make landfall. The crew can number as many as 20. Flying 10,000 feet above sea level, at 210 knots, the aircraft has maneuvered through conditions where the pressure has dropped as low as 800 Milibars. It generally takes eight to 10 hours to fly a hurricane mission.
There are no parachutes on board.
From his description, the missions can sound somewhat like a roller-coaster ride.
“As you approach the eye-wall the first thing you experience is a fairly strong updraft, okay, you go through, and like I say as you got your turbulence and as you break out on the other side, you’ll experience a decently strong downdraft,” he said.
But Mitchell, his Flight Engineer, Dewie Floyd and Flight Director, Tom Shepherd all agree every storm deserves respect, pointing out that each is different and all are unpredictable from the minute you reach the outer bands.
Trying to steal the spot-light from Ms. Piggy this day, is the KC-135, a Boeing 707 used by N.A.S.A. for weightlessness training and a bit further down a massive air re-fueling plane from the 185th Air National Guard in Sioux City Iowa; loading up with 31-thousand gallons of fuel.
But Kermit’s not around and Ms. Piggy isn’t searching for suitors. Mitchell, Floyd and Shepherd are giving her plenty of attention. They’ve weathered some serious storms together.
It takes one minute of turbulence and a strong nerve to get through the eye-wall, says Mitchell, and the elegant Ms. Piggy doesn’t pull any punches when they’re fighting their way through.
Copyright © 2006 - Houston Airport System
| 
