End of a Long Season

Hi Folks -

With temperatures here in Tampa plunging to near or below freezing tonight, I guess it's safe to call an end to the 2008 hurricane season.  It was a busy year for us and didn't end with

Hurricane Ike.  We flew another storm, Hurricane Kyle, shortly thereafter and ended the season with Hurricane Paloma in November.  Yes, I said November - the 7th and 8th to be exact - in a storm south of Cuba that rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 4 in two days.  The Google Earth track as developed by a colleague is shown here.  (Please click on the images to enlarge them - hit the back button to return to the blog.)

Paloma was a nasty storm which weakened and died over eastern Cuba and did not affect the U.S. Even so, it did some damage to our P-3 similar to that done by a similar storm in the same location several years earlier.  The damage was caused by graupel and hail.  It wasn't quite this bad in the Paloma flight, but close.  

At this point I will end this blog and move on to other things.  But be aware - we are less than four and a half months away from the beginning of the 2009 season.  I'm sure there will 

other tales to tell then.  

Thanks for your interest.  Hope you were able to take away some useful information about hurricanes and why/how we fly them. Had fun doing this.  Ended the year with a final career total of 564 hurricane penetrations.  Since that's the current world record, perhaps I should quit while I'm ahead.  We'll see.

Thanks again

Inside the Radomes

Back again.  Did you ever wonder what we had inside those two radomes, the tail doppler and the lower fuselage radars?  Well, take a look.  Don't want to hide anything from you.  

The tail doppler radar antenna, left, and the lower fuselage (LF) antenna, right, are being removed prior to this P-3 heading to Jacksonville for depot level maintenance - an 8-month overhaul where a full tear-down, inspection and repair will be done.  At the beginning of June 09 we will get back a healthy aircraft which we can take out into hurricanes with full confidence of its integrity.

Click on them to check them out.  Don't forget to hit your browser's back button to return to the blog.

Cheers.

Facts and Figures

Sorry for the long break in my postings.  Following Hurricane Ike, for which I made a couple of postings, we immediately had TS Kyle which was born just south of Hispanola and moved north.  It was of interest to our research folks because it at one time posed a threat to the East Coast and thus needed an all out effort from our P-3s and G-IV.  Following Kyle, we all took a week to get back on track as many of the crew were exhausted.  So much flying had been done in the 30 day period that involved Gustav, Hanna, Ike and Kyle that many of the crew reached their legal limit of flight hours in this period that they had to receive a waiver from our flight surgeon just to complete the flights into Kyle.  So, you didn't know there was a limit to how many hours any crew member, be it on a commercial airline or on a government aircraft, can fly.  Well, there is, and with that and other things in mind, I thought I'd use this relatively quiet time (well, not too quiet - there are four systems in the Atlantic and Caribbean as I write this, but none pose a threat to the U.S. or are of interest to our research team) to give you some facts and figures about our flight program.

The legal limit for flight hours that any crew member, pilot, technician, scientist or whomever, may accumulate in a 30 consecutive day period is 120 hours.  To fly more than this number one must request and be granted a waiver by a flight surgeon or physician so authorized to perform this function.  Now, you may not think 120 hours in a month is  very many, but try flying almost 9 hours each day during 15 of those 30 days, and perhaps you may have some feel for how exhausting it might be.  Add to the flight time the effort it takes to prepare for each mission, and these hours become telling.  As always, though, we manage.

If you would like to know what it costs to fly one of these missions on a P-3.  Here's the story.

If we forget about what we called "fixed" costs, that's salaries, the cost of running the facility, etc., we have left what we call the "variable" costs.  These include fuel, premium pay (overtime, weekend pay, night time differential, holiday pay and hazard duty pay), satellite communication (satcom) charges and miscellaneous expenses such as landing and parking fees, shipping, travel expenses, transportation, lavatory fees, facility servicing fees, etc.  Dropsondes are a separate charge which we don not include in our flight hour cost, but I'll throw those in anyway as they are a mission relate cost.  Already I think you have the feeling that it isn't cheap.  Well, here's a look.

Operating from our home base at MacDill AFB in Tampa, FL, the miscellaneous fees are non-existent.  So, it's a lot less expensive (I use that term rather than "cheaper" for good reason).  That leaves us with fuel charges and premium pay.  Here's how that breaks down.

On a typical 9 hour flight we will use 6,750 gallons of Jet fuel.  At the Air Force base where from which we operate we currently pay $4.26 per gallon for this fuel.  So that you don't have to do the math, that comes to $28,755, or $3,195 per flight hour.  Satellite communications (Satcom) - on a typical hurricane flight this averages about $2,500 per flight.  Premium pay can run an additional $5,000 per flight.

On an normal hurricane flight we will drop on average 20 dropsondes.  These cost about $725 each.  So add another $15,000 to the total.

Let's add up these charges.  

Fuel: $28,755

Satcom:     $2,500

Prem. Pay:   $5,000

Total: $36,255, or about $4,300 per flight hour.

Throw in the dropsondes at $15,000 and the total rises to: $51,255.  

On a given storm, we may do 8 flights in succession over a four day period, so inside of a week we've spent over $290,040 for flight hour expenses and another $120,000 for dropsondes.  Ouch!

When we deploy to a foreign base, the price goes up significantly because of employee travel costs and all of the other miscellaneous expenses I mentioned above.  On average, it costs a bit more than $5,500 per flight hour, not including dropsondes, to operate the P-3s during the hurricane season.  As a comparison, it only costs about $3,360 per flight hour to operate the Gulfstream G-IV.  But then they drop about 10 more sondes per flight, so the costs come out about even.  

Thought I'd leave you with this.  Although these costs are high, the value of the data obtained to improved forecasts and the saving of lives is far greater and probably not calculable.  Like everything in life - it's all relative.

 Season is winding down.  I will probably have another posting or two to conclude this blog.  I do appreciate your taking the time to read it, and I look forward to repeating it next hurricane season.  

Thank you.

Flight into Ike Pt: II

Here we go.  Down the runway and into the air from MacDill AFB in Tampa, FL.  The flight we are taking is our last into Hurricane Ike on Friday last (12 September), and it will last almost nine hours, bringing us back to this same base around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday morning.  As we takeoff from sun-swept Tampa, we are high on anticipation and apprehension of what we will face when we arrive at the storm just offshore of Galveston Island, TX.  

Our Flight Director is up to the challenge, and wearing his "lucky

hat he settles in for the long mission ahead.  His job will be to safely direct us in and out of the storm as requested by the two PIs we have onboard.  During this mission we will make seven penetrations into Ike's eye before heading back to our home base.

As we head for the storm which is about to make landfall, we note that tropical storm force winds (>34 kts.) were observed some 250 n.mi. east of the center of Hurricane Ike and that hurricane force winds (>64 kts.) extended out some 80 n.mi. at the surface. If you've never seen what the ocean looks like at low hurricane wind speeds, take a look at the 

picture to the left taken en route to the storm.

As mentioned in earlier postings, the profile data obtained from our GPS dropsonde is vital to unlocking the secrets of any storm. This device, which is dropped from the aircraft, transmits temperature, pressure, humidity data back to the plane twice a second as it falls through the atmosphere to the surface.  Because it has a full GPS receiver aboard, it also sends back very accurate information concerning the location of the sonde as it falls, to the

surface, and from this we can calculate very accurate wind speed and direction.  These data have proven invaluable to the forecasters and modelers in developing better storm forecasts. The technician at the right is preparing a sonde for launch into the storm.

Penetrating the eye is always the most interesting part of the flight.  You are always apprehensive on the first pass into the eye as to how rough the ride will be.  Sometimes the pass through the eyewall can be a bone-jarring, teeth-rattling experience, but on other occasions it can be relatively smooth.  If you were looking for an "E-ticket" (remember the old Disney World ride categories) ride into a hurricane, Ike, in its latter days, was anything but.  The seven penetrations we made on this flight were more like "B-ticket" rides, which for those of us who do this as a living is great.  Some of the VIPs and media who flew

with us on the last few flights into Ike felt otherwise.

Here's a visual image of what it looks like on the flight deck of a NOAA P-3 during a penetration into Ike.  The flight engineer, who occupies the seat between the two pilots, is adjusting the power levers (throttles) to help maintain controlled flight.  You can see the radar image on the scope in the center of the picture.  As you can tell from the second image, it does get a bit bouncy as you hit the outer part of the eyewall.  

Sometimes when you are in the center of the storm you observe other aircraft who are in the eye at the same time.  The Air Force Reserves from Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS are responsible for the routine hurricane reconnaissance flights, and we occasionally cross paths in the eye.  Never fear.  We maintain at least 2,000 ft. 

 from each other as well as keep in touch by radio at all times.  The "spot" in the image to the left is one of the C-130Js that fly these storms.

Well, that's about it.  To conclude this posting I want to share with you a few more images 

from this flight.  To the left is the Houston, TX radar image captured aboard the P-3 (Yes, we do have internet courtesy of 

satellite communications) during the flight.  To the right is the flight track of the P-3 during the mission, and in the center is the "master" hard at work.

Let's Take a Flight into Hurricane Ike - Pt I: Preparation

Ike the hurricane is gone. The aftermath, however, will be with us for some time to come. I had the opportunity to make three flights into Ike as it crossed the Gulf toward Texas, and I want to give you a sense of what they were like, almost to the time when Ike make landfall at Galveston, TX.

As you know our aircraft for the most part serve as platforms for research scientists to acquire data that can be used to improve

hurricane understanding and predictions. As such, we always carry a Principal Investigator (PI) who presents the plan for each mission. The PI works through one of our meteorologists who serves as the Flight Director (FD) for the mission. They always put their heads together to work out details of the mission before the pre-flight briefing, which is held two hours prior to flight time. These two activities are shown to the right.

While this briefing is taking place, crew members on the aircraft are preparing the plane for the mission, which includes preparing the scientific systems for the mission, fueling the aircraft with almost 9,000 gal. of aviation gas, and loading expendables such as the Airborne Expendable Bathythermograph (AXBT), a buoy that is dropped into the water to obtain profiles of temperature for the calculation of ocean heat budgets. A couple of images showing these activities are shown to the left.

The final activity that takes place before takeoff is what we call

the plane-side brief. This, in effect, is a safety briefing during which all aspects of the mission are discussed and assignments made for duties that must be performed in case of an emergency.

And now it's time to start engines, taxi to the runway at MacDill AFB and take off. This and a description of the flight will be presented in Pt. II of this posting. Don't forget that you can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them. Just hit your browser back button to return to the blog.