Hurricane Hunters in Ike

Hurricane Hurricane Ike Alan Sealls put his eyes in the eye of Ike with the Hurricane Hunters

by Alan Sealls

Published: Thu, September 11, 2008 - 8:54 pm CST Last Updated: Thu, September 11, 2008 - 9:57 pm CST

This is the story of Hurricane Ike. A calm clear morning on central Gulf Coast with
Hurricane Ike 500 miles away. News 5 is on the air and you tune in to get the latest from John Nodar... just to make sure Ike's path has not changed. I'm at work 8 hours early for a field trip to fly into the eye of Hurricane Ike. A trip that starts at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. The crew of pilots, technicians, navigators and meteorologists is briefed. On the flight line powerful propeller engines are primed to push us down the runway and roar into the blue. Our initial heading slides us southwest over the marshes, man made canals, and mighty Mississippi of southwest Louisiana. It's easy to see how Katrina could send so much water toward New Orleans. From flight level it looks like business as usual below- cargo ships and oil rigs. This truly is the calm before the storm. The C-130 crew takes this quiet period to ready their instruments and computers.

Photojournalist Mic Ward finds views through the small windows of the plane. Within 30 minutes we lose the blue sky and find clouds. In about an hour we are into the first feeder bands arcing across the horizon. Turbulence is light but we strap in anyway. At 12:30pm we make our first eye penetration at 10,000 feet. Sensors called dropsondes are dropped from the plane at strategic locations to sample the structure of the eye. Each one costs about $500 but the data they deliver is priceless. Technical Sergeant Scott Blair is up and down in his seat timing the best spot to aim for reliable data. I am able to get up too and along with the flight crew we all study the ocean below. Wind, wave heights, what sort of information can they see?

Major Deann Lufkin, 403rd Wing, USAF: We can’t see the wave heights but we can estimate the wind direction and speed using the foam on the water.

Major Lufkin also uses aircraft sensors to provide the National Hurricane Center with real-time data that is available in no other way. This is the information you see online (our version should say wkrg.com) and on TV. Some of the data is recorded every 30 seconds as you see it on our First Alert HurTrak. Even though it's shades of gray in the majority of the storm the on-board radar clearly shows where the eye is. Each time we go in and out turbulence picks up a bit but no worse than that on a commercial aircraft. Ike turns out to be a broad slowly strengthening storm

Major Deann Lufkin, 403rd Wing, USAF: It’s kind of meandering because the eye is having problems... but it’s not heading for Mobile. That’s the most important thing we found for today!

After our third pass through the eye the setting sun highlights textures and shapes in the banded clouds. It's a beautiful serene scene until we turn northeast and head for the eye one last time. Our total flight time was 9.5 hours at a crew cost of easily $50,000. If we had traveled in a straight line we could have been halfway around the world. Back at Keesler the next crew is briefed to repeat the mission overnight.

Major Chad Gibson, 403rd Wing, USAF: We’re flying it 24 hours a day if it’s any threat to landfall we’re going to have our Air Force C-130 aircraft in that storm collecting data.
They don't stop until the storms are gone.

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