Flight Training - June 2012 - 29

WEATHER OFFICERS continuously monitor conditions in the storm environment (above). The WC-130J provides much more capability, in part because of more advanced avionics. Pilots now operate with a Head-Up Display, or HUD (below left).

back to the hurricane center via satellite in close to real time, where it is placed into forecasting models. According to the National Hurricane Center, the work of the 53rd increases the accuracy of the forecast path by 30 percent. That may not seem like much, but when you consider it costs $1 million a mile to evacuate for a storm, the savings can be significant. Between that, and a better allocation of limited emergency and evacuation resources, the benefits are huge.
WASHING MACHINE. Stevens describes the feeling of being inside a hurricane as like a washing machine. There’s severe to extreme turbulence, torrential rain, and serious updrafts and downdrafts. “I’ve seen instances where we’ve had airplanes at idle power, that weigh 130,000 pounds, the pilots maintaining a pitch attitude to stay well below VA, going up 6,000 feet a minute,” he says. The feeder bands that form the eyewall are usually the strongest part of the storm, and Stevens says they could encounter 6,000-feet-per-minute updrafts before crossing through the feeder band, only to be pushed down at 6,000 feet a minute on the opposite side. “Sometimes it can be a 45-degree crab just to fly straight, during

the portions of the flight within about 45 miles of the eye,” he says. Once they cross into the eye, things calm down for a minute. “The wind can drop from 110 knots to 90, 80, 70 as fast as you can say it,” Stevens says. If the eye is well-defined, the crew could potentially see the ocean and then a straight wall of clouds going up to 60,000 feet. The eye may be only five to 15 miles across for well-defined storms, or up to 50 miles or more for those not as strong. Getting to the eye is one of the more dangerous parts of the flight, and the navigator and weather officer work hand in hand to make sure it’s done safely. The WC-130J has onboard weather radar that’s able to show extreme turbulence, which Brady says can even be set to flash for the worst conditions. “As a navigator, the primary responsibility I have is monitoring and updating the crew via radar. We can detect wind shear, we can detect turbulence through Doppler sensing. So we don’t barrel straight into everything. We do some maneuvering around, especially the dangerous-looking portion of the storm,” Stevens says.

Unbelievably, there are no ops specs or guidelines for when a storm might be too severe to fly in to. “We’re not going to say we’re not going into that because it’s a category 5,” Brady says. According to Stevens, they’ve flown every storm since 1944. In fact, Stevens remembers only one storm where the crew called it off, but that was after they had made it through the eye and gathered the data. It was Hurricane Mitch, and they were flying off the coast of Nicaragua. Once the hurricane hit land, the mechanical turbulence from the mountains caused especially difficult conditions, even for the crew still flying over water. “The pilot said, ‘I think I’ve had about enough of this. What do you think?’” And with that they went home. Although on the surface it may seem contrary to everything we know as pilots to fly into such awful weather, the crews of the 53rd do it safely thanks in part to a simple technique all pilots learn from nearly the beginning of pilot training: Maintain a pitch attitude and power setting to stay below maneuvering speed and the airplane will stay intact.
Ian Twombly is editor of Flight Training magazine.
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Flight Training - June 2012

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