CaptionWould your stomach be prepared to fly through a hurricane not once but 30 or 40 times? That's what the men and women of the Hurricane Hunter Air Force Squadron do each time a tropical storm or hurricane threatens land in the US, Mexico and Caribbean.
That airplane, as well as the crew were in Raleigh May 6.
Pilot and Commander Barry Choy, says flying through the eye of the storms is not as bad as people fear.
"For the most part it's probably like the turbulence you'd experience on an airliner and it goes up from there," he said. But Choy acknowledges, when folks find out what he does for a living, "people say you must be crazy, probably the first thing people say. Then they start talking to you a little bit and it's really not as bad as one would imagine."
Daniel Brown, with the Nation Hurricane Center, says the data that the Hurricane Hunters gather is incredibly valuable.
"They provide us at the Hurricane Center with a lot of valuable data. If we didn't have the plane, we'd have to estimate what the winds are and estimate a lot of things from satellites," said Brown.
The typical crew for a hurricane mission is about six team members. Three very experienced pilots, a navigator, a weather officer and a system operator.
2009 Hurricane Names:
Bill
Claudette
Danny
Erika
Fred
Grace
Henri
Ida
Joaquin
Kate
Larry
Mindy
Nicholas
Odette
Peter
Rose
Sam
Teresa
Victor
Wanda
If the entire list of 21 names is used in a season, additional storm names come from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. Notice there's no names starting with q, u, x, y or z. And the Pacific gets its own list of names each year too. Naming hurricanes is a tradition that dates back hundreds of years. Natives of the West Indies named storms after the particular saint's day on which they occurred.
Link: http://geography.about.com/od/physicalgeography/a/2009names.htm
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