Hurricane hunters: the pilots who fly into category 5 storms

The US air force has released footage taken from inside Hurricane Irma, to show what a category 5 storm looks like from its centre.

The video was captured by the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, otherwise known as the Hurricane Hunters, an all-reserve air force unit who gather data by flying their aircraft into storms such as Irma, Reuters reports.

The squad is based at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and its origins dates back to a 1943 barroom “dare” by two former army air corps pilots to fly through a hurricane off Texas.

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The air force reserve’s Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hitterman, who has flown into around 50 hurricanes when he’s not working as a Delta Airlines pilot, compares the experience to driving through a car wash with a group of gorillas jumping around on the vehicle. Sometimes, Hitterman tells Reuters, the shaking is so intense that he cannot see the plane instruments directly in front of him.

US satellite data alone isn’t nearly as effective without the information gathered by the crews. Hurricane hunter planes fly in an X-pattern, where the centre of the X is located in the hurricane’s eye, says Vice News. The aircrafts are equipped with an array of radars and sensors that collect meteorological data.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the air force reserve flew several missions into Irma’s eye, in a bid to gain a better understanding of the storm’s power, as it tore through the Caribbean toward Florida, USA Today reports.

“We fly right through the eye wall into the heart of the storm at 5,000 to 10,000 feet above the Earth’s surface,” Lt. Col. Brian Schroeder told the newspaper.

Flight meteorologist Major Nicole Mitchell, a television news meteorologist and mother of an eight-month-old boy, collects data so that forecasters can tell residents whether to evacuate their homes as Irma or other storms advance.

“It’s a fact that we make a difference,” Mitchell told Reuters.

During flights, the weather data is collected and sent directly to the US National Hurricane Centre using satellite communications, the Hurricane Hunters Association says.

Since the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron was founded, six hurricane and typhoon hunting aircraft have been lost, at a cost of 53 lives, according to the Weather Underground website.