![]() NOAA 42 begins to orbit the small eye of Hugo, desperately trying to avoid entering its fierce winds again. To add to their predicament, the navigator Sean White spots a de-icing boot dangling loose over the engine next to the one on fire. The pilots pull the plane out of its dive 880 feet above the raging ocean surface, a loss of 620 feet in just seconds. Just then they enter the calm of Hugo’s eye. Even worse, one of the aircraft’s four engines spouts flames. Even items which were fastened down, such as a 200 pound life raft, are torn loose and sent careening around the cabin. They slammed into an updraft/downdraft/updraft triplet which wrenched the aircraft violently from 20 mph up, to 22 mph down, to 45 mph up again, all while the horizontal winds peak at 185 mph (298 km/hr)! Then force on the plane goes from 3 g’s downward to 6 g’s up (1 g = the force of gravity). The eye appears to be just 12 miles across. Once the radar was working again, NOAA 42 was just minutes from penetrating the storm. However, since this was the first plane to enter this storm, the crew had no idea how strong the eyewall turbulence would be. The hope was to gather energetics information close to the top of the boundary layer. Jeff Masters, the Flight Director, and Frank Marks, the Lead Scientist, decide to enter the storm at 1500 feet, an altitude much lower than the usual 5-10 thousand feet. On approach to the storm there was a temporary outage of the lower fuselage radar, blinding the crew as to the structure and strength of the storm they were approaching. The plan was for NOAA 42 to enter the storm first, followed by NOAA 43 “Miss Piggy” and the USAF aircraft, designated Teal 57. In addition, several Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter C-130s had similarly deployed to carry out reconnaissance on the storm. The day before the two NOAA P-3 Orion research planes had deployed to Barbados to intercept Hugo while it was still east of the Lesser Antilles. This referred to a hurricane flight where the turbulence was so severe as to put the mission in jeopardy. ![]() On September 15, 1989, NOAA 42 “Kermit” flew a research mission into Hurricane Hugo, east of Barbados, that became what old-time Hurricane Hunters called a “hairy hop”.
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