My dad didn’t have to tell me the storm could have killed him. Instead, I heard it in his details: water was leaking into the plane’s tail section, crewmen were lighting cigarettes for pilots too focused to light up themselves, and the aircraft was bucking like a jeep driving over the rutted roads back in Guam.
My dad was sitting in the plane’s midsection recording wind speed, barometric pressure, and temperature from the shaking dials and gauges. In the cockpit, the pilots were fighting to reach the storm’s eye to pinpoint its location.
What a sensation! Was I dreaming? It was calm with just the noise of the plane’s engines. The ceiling of cirrus clouds was very high. There was a ring of thick clouds forming the eye of the storm. Unfortunately, reaching the centre of the storm was only half the flight. The pilots had to head back to Guam, and the plane was running low on fuel.
It’s now possible to call up the predicted paths of active tropical cyclones on a Website, but knowing when one storm will fizzle but another will become a Hurricane Katrina remains tricky.
As I stand on the tarmac of the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, a strong breeze sends the Atlantic’s warm and humid salt air across an almost empty runway. In front of me is a 50-foot-long gloss-white plane that is a mishmash of parts. A turbofan engine on top of the aircraft splits a V-shaped rear tail.
Of course, no one has to worry about the view. The plane is a Global Hawk unmanned autonomous vehicle, better known as a drone. NASA received its two drones as hand-me-downs from the large Air Force surveillance fleet. Instead of loading the planes with payloads to watch over North Korea or track terrorists in Afghanistan, NASA reworked the drones to observe tropical cyclones.
The drone can also reach altitudes almost three times as high as the Orion. That’s about five miles higher than a typical cruising altitude for a passenger airliner. From that altitude, the scientists back at Wallops can see the entirety of the storms. The Hawk’s altitude, reach, and flight time over the storm enable scientists to claw deeper into tropical cyclones to find out why and how they evolve. The bullet points of storm formation are well-known to researchers.
My father and his crew did make it out of that storm, but, without enough fuel to fly back to Guam, the pilot diverted to Tokyo. Meanwhile, back over the darkened Pacific, nature was still churning the ocean, daring future flyers to discover the tropical cyclone’s secrets.