On the afternoon of October 25, when the center of Hurricane Fox (names in the early 1950s followed the phonetic alphabet then in use) was between Miami and Nassau in the Bahamas with 95-knot winds, the cloud seeder took off for the storm in his Luscombe. Just before nine that evening, a Miami radio station picked up a radio message from him in which he said that he was about 50 miles east of Miami at the edge of the storm.
During 26 minutes of talking with the radio station, the pilot said he was in strong headwinds. Finally, the pilot radioed: "Out of fuel, descending, give my love to my wife and family." Two days of searching by the Civil Air Patrol and the Coast Guard turned up no sign of the pilot or airplane.
By then hurricane flying had be-come routine, but it was done by Air Force and Navy crews in large, sturdy airplanes. Hurricane flying began during World War II and continues today with Air Force Reserve crews flying WC-130s and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration crews flying turboprop WP-3s and a Gulfstream jet. Over the years hurricane flying has proven to be safe for the experienced crews who do it. No hurricane-hunter aircraft has gone down in a storm since 1974, and between World War II and 1974 only four disappeared in storms - three Air Force airplanes in Pacific Ocean typhoons and a Navy airplane in a Caribbean Sea hurricane.
Still, today's general aviation pilots, who are living in an age that has seen hurricanes become television stars, seem to be willing to leave hurricane flying to the experts. Even casual viewers of television news have a good idea of how large hurricanes are and how strong their winds can be.
The National Transportation Safety Board's online database yields few mentions of the word hurricane in a search of 44,580 accident and incident reports dating from 1983, when the data begins, through November 1999, the end of the last hurricane season.
Most of these references were to the Hurricane, Utah, airport or to airplanes with hurricane in their names. Only one reports on an accident caused by weather connected with a hurricane.
This happened on November 18, 1994, as Hurricane Gordon was stalled off the South Carolina coast and weakening to a tropical storm with winds of less than 74 mph. When the pilot of a Mooney obtained a weather briefing for a flight from Morristown, New Jersey, to Chatham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, the briefer mentioned that the hurricane was causing widespread low ceilings and visibility all along the coast.
The airplane crashed after initiating a missed approach at Chatham in weather that included an obscured ceiling of 100 feet and one and one-quarter-mile visibility in light rain and fog. The conditions were not hurricane-like; the wind was only 12 knots.
This accident illustrates the greatest danger from hurricanes to pilots who would never think of trying to fly directly into a storm. There have probably been other accidents like this one in the widespread bad weather around hurricanes or the remnants of hurricanes, but they aren't identified as being connected to hurricanes because no one used the word hurricane in the NTSB reports.
Hurricanes can bring widespread low ceilings and visibility even if they are far away and weakening. In fact, hurricanes can cause days of heavy rain even after they are no longer classified as hurricanes or even tropical storms.
Hurricanes are born over oceans that are warmer than about 80 degrees. They begin as tropical depressions, become tropical storms, and are given names when their maximum sustained surface winds reach 39 mph. When the sustained winds top 74 mph, they be-come hurricanes.
The word hurricane describes such storms over the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific Ocean east of the International Date Line. West of the Date Line and north of the equator, they are typhoons. In the rest of the world, they are called tropical cyclones.
No matter what they're called, mature storms consist of bands of thunderstorms that spiral into the storm's center. In a really strong, well-developed hurricane, these spiral bands or rain bands wrap into a wall of strong thunderstorms, called the eye wall around the nearly calm eye in the middle. The lowest atmospheric pressure is in the eye and the strongest winds are in the eye wall.
Hurricanes are large storms; even in a small one, winds of at least 39 mph cover a diameter of 100 miles. Some are huge. When Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina in 1989, it brought 74 mph or stronger winds to a 90-mile stretch of the coast. In addition to creating winds, hurricanes push ashore a dome of water called the storm surge that can be as much as 20 feet high.
The power for all of this violence comes from the latent heat that's released as the water vapor in the humid air that's rising in the storm condenses into clouds and rain. Hurricanes begin to weaken and die when they move over cool water or land, which reduces the supply of warm, humid air.
Unlike the extratropical storms that form over land or sea in the middle latitudes, hurricanes do not have fronts. That is, they are not made of contrasting masses of warm and cool air. A hurricane is all warm and all humid.
This is why, even after they come ashore and weaken to tropical depressions with winds of 38 mph or less, they still bring widespread low ceilings and visibility and heavy rain. Even without strong winds, a dying tropical storm is a huge blob of very humid air.
At the very least, pilots should be ready for a few days of low ceilings and visibility and flooding rain over a large area if a hurricane moves in and stalls. This is most likely to happen if the hurricane merges into an extratropical storm or front.
On the other hand, beautiful weather can surround a hurricane. Air that's rising in the eye wall and spiral bands flows out of the top of the storm and comes down well away from the hur-ricane. Such descending air clears the sky; this is why satellite photos often show clear skies around a hurricane. Often, a fast-moving storm will hit land and race away as it weakens, leaving behind beautiful weather for cleaning up.
In addition to not wanting to fly into a hurricane, most pilots don't like the idea of leaving their airplanes at the mercy of a storm. Airplanes that are tied down can be seriously damaged by even a weak hurricane, and strong hurricanes can blow down even sturdy hangars. This is why the military evacuates its airplanes if a hurricane seems to be on the way. Deciding whether to fly your airplane inland is difficult because predictions of where a storm will hit can be 200 miles off 48 hours before it arrives.
Anyone trying to decide whether to fly an airplane away from a hurricane needs to realize that the storm's outer rain bands, which bring rain, poor visibility, and strong, gusty winds, can arrive 12 hours or more before the eye moves ashore. Often the forecasted time of arrival is when the eye is expected.
Authorities try to complete evacuations of people in areas that could be flooded by storm surge before 39 mph winds begin. When these winds arrive with rain, driving becomes dangerous. Obviously, by this time it's too late to safely fly an airplane away.
There are no hard and fast rules about when to try to fly an airplane to safety. In making the decision, you must balance considerations such as the storm's strength, the odds of it hitting you (National Hurricane Center forecasts include probabilities of a storm affecting various locations), and whether to spend precious time flying the airplane to safety or spend that time preparing your home for the approaching storm.
The danger for pilots isn't over after the storm ends. When disasters happen, general aviation pilots are often among the first to offer help.
One of the hurricane reports in the NTSB database describes the crash of a twin-engine Cessna that was helping in relief efforts after Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida in August 1992.
The NTSB report says the pilot did not have a multiengine rating and that when the airplane crashed shortly after takeoff, it was 1,112 pounds over its maximum gross takeoff weight.
The challenge after a storm could be the biggest one: balancing the desire to help with the need to fly safely.
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