Hurricane Air Force Expanding
The Miami Herald reports on the expansion of hurricane aerial resources:Agencies ready planes to study hurricanes
The Air Force Reserve WC-130 turboprop “hurricane hunters” make the most critical flights, feeding information on a storm’s strength and structure, necessary for forecasters to issue advisories and tropical warnings.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will deploy a WP-3 Orion turboprop and a Gulfstream G-IV jet to study how storms intensify. NASA will send three jets, a DC-8, a WB-57 and a Global Hawk, into storms to learn more about how tropical systems evolve and what triggers them to suddenly strengthen.
And the National Center for Atmospheric Research will dispatch a Gulfstream G-V to study how hurricanes form in the first place.
The C-130 is a cargo aircraft, the Orion a Navy patrol aircraft, and the Gulfstreams are business jets. The WB-57 is a heavily modified light bomber design used for high altitude missions, and the Global Hawk is a high altitude remotely piloted aircraft, or UAV. The DC-8 was a standard airliner, but NASA’s aircraft is a flying laboratory.
Now all they need are a few storms, although they might want to see what is going on that has been suppressing the formation of storms this year.
2 comments
…Google is so much fun. I was a little confused about the WC-130/WP-3 thing until I looked it up and (re)learned that it’s the USAFR 53rd Weather Recce folks who have flown the WC-130 for years and it’s actually NOAA that flies the P-3’s (which they have named – and graced with nose art representing – Miss Piggy and Kermit). I had always thought of the Orion as the Hurricane Hunter (but I’m a big fan of the P-3 as a retardant plane anyway), but it turns out I was wrong.
Even more fun, NOAA’s Gulfstream IV is named “Gonzo”…
I have to confess, though, that my eyes bugged out a little bit at the reference to the WB-57. I have, in various times/places/circumstances, flown in some really old aircraft at the behest of taxpayers and have even had the opportunity to speculate in a loud voice over the rattle/roar of said ancient beast whether some of the tape on the inside of the fuselage might be the residue of incoming fire somewhere in Southeast Asia back in the Vietnam era…
But a Canberra? I don’t even have to google that one to know that it would take several large burly men armed with cattle prods to get me inside the fuselage of a hurricane-bound aircraft that last rolled off the assembly line back about the time my parents were trying to teach me that wearing my underwear on my head wasn’t what “getting dressed” meant…
These WB-57s are the new variants with modern engines. The older versions had ramjets on pylons under the wings outboard of the turbofans for the high altitude work. The crew wears space suits, that’s how high they fly, so they are well above “the weather”. The wings are twice as long as the old Canberra’s and were added after the airframes were retired from their original mission.
If you click on the circular Air Force emblem on the left side bar, and go to the bottom of the page you will see a link for Aircraft. I have two pictures of the WB-57 – a newer model given to Colorado and the older version that used to fly out of Eielson AFB in Alaska for high altitude air sampling.
The P-3s are tough old birds. They were designed to fly low and slow looking for submarines on coastal patrols.
I really liked my time in C-130s. Not only was the airframe solid, they had the power to get you out of trouble. The best part was they were a fantastic aircraft to ditch in at sea. They even had hatches in the top so you could launch the rafts without getting wet. There was also the fact that if you had to bailout they were designed to make it easy. On the 135s you had an “escape hatch” which was generally advertised as something that “might not get you killed.”
The P-3s and 130s are the aircraft that actually fly inside the hurricanes, rather than over the top, like most of the others.