There are a lot of comments from people who see my pics and videos and express how much they would like to go fly with the hurricane hunters. And I'm not sure they really appreciate what that means. We don't take passengers apart from the occasional media but I thought it might be interesting to go into a bit more detail…. A thread seems to be in order.

Show time for a flight is ~2 hours before takeoff. The weather officer calls for an update on the storm and the rest of the crew updates the flight planning documents. We brief the mission and make sure flight plan and other paperwork is filed for our weather reconnaissance area.

Last night's flight into Lee:

About 45 minutes prior to takeoff the crew steps to the plane… in this case it's in St Croix, a sunny tropical island, which means it was probably 110 degrees in the cockpit. Once we get the auxiliary power unit running (~130 decibels) it will power one of the A/C packs which starts getting things cooled off in the cockpit, maybe to the upper 80s while we go through the preflight. In the back, where the loadmaster and weather officer sit, it's still blazing hot. Passengers also sit in the back.

Once engines are running and we take off it starts getting feasibly comfortable in the aircraft. At this point things are usually pretty straightforward as we can talk through regular radios with ATC and it's just normal flying. You can see St Croix from the air during the first few minutes after takeoff.

The next three hours are cruising along getting to the storm. Once out over the ocean we use HF radios to keep in in touch with oceanic ATC. Think of it like listening to a really screechy AM radio. Sometimes there are clouds you could look at but mostly it's just a lot of open ocean.

The crew is attending to the various aircraft systems and occasionally exchanging screechy messages over HF radio with places like New York Oceanic. But overall not a lot going on for three hours.

As a passenger on the flight you would likely notice that the C-130 is a bit different than a airliner. But where it lacks comfortable passenger seats it makes up for it with noise and vibration that will, in all likelihood, put you to sleep.

Last night there was a cool looking sunset for about 20 minutes as we approached the entry point to the hurricane. That was nice, a lot of times it's just cloudy daytime and then cloudy nighttime. So as a passenger that would be something to see.

The big storms with well a well defined eye are popular but they are not the norm. In many case it's a ~30 minute flight from the entry point to the eye spent mostly looking at radar and flying the plane. Then you get to the eye and see what there is for ~5 minutes fixing the center of circulation and heading back outbound.

On a typical mission we will spend ~6 hours in the storm environment making four passes through the eye. There are sometimes really incredible sights like when Lee was a Cat 5 last week but much of the time it's looking at clouds on radar and flying the plane. Surprisingly enough there were portions of the eye last night where stars were visible but that isn't always the case.

The only passengers we ever really take are members of the media who are usually very excited to fly through a hurricane. I haven't taken detailed notes but anecdotally I will say that a good portion of them are asleep in the back of the plane by the third pass through the eye.

After completing the hurricane reconnaissance is when the real fun begins…. The flight back! In the case of last nights flight back from Lee it was ~4.5 hours. Lots more screechy talking on HF to pick up an IFR clearance with New York. No real way to church it up, it's just a lot of flying the plane.

Last nights mission was 11.6 hours which did mean I got some solid podcast listening in. I recommend
@lexfridman
discussion with Walter Isaacson about the Elon Musk book. Also
@jockowillink
discussion with Rainn Wilson from The Office. That one was good because it was pretty funny and 4.5 hours long which meant it pretty well covered the flight back.

We typically fly with hard crews when on the road and I was fortunate to have a great crew this trip. It's like a road trip adventure with your five best friends (for the week) but 9 days into a trip at 3am flying home conversation is slim and it's good to have some solid podcasts to listen to. As a passenger with no responsibility on the crew there is 100% chance you would be passed out in the back.

There are some amazing things to see on hurricane hunter missions but it's a 99% flying the plane and hacking the mission and 1% incredible sights.