As hurricane Dean is starting the season, let’s talk a bit about hurricanes, their impact on traffic, and planes flying through them. Yes, you read correctly, some planes do fly through hurricanes. In fact, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organisation (NOAA) has planes flying through each of them !

To remain simple, a hurricane is a zone of very low pressure, arround which strong winds are setting up. Wind speeds can be far above the maximum values admitted by airlines for their operations. However, the wind is not a big problem compared to the windhsears, or changes of wind, which cause severe turbulence. Shortly said, commercial traffic does not fly through them, nor close to them.

So who does, and why ? There are two reasons for flying through a hurricane: research, and forecasting. In fact, getting data from the site directly helps forecasters to do a much better job than with sattelite observation only, and for this purpose, crews are flying through each and every hurricane, as I mentionned before.

Now, some speedlinks for those of you how are more interested in this topic:
Geoff Fox report on his “passenger flight” through a hurricane
An excellent video from “science daily” from crews actually flying throug hurricanes
Paper about hurricanes from NOAA

And obvioisly, if any of you has more details to share, any comment is welcome.