Riding aboard the Hurricane Hunter

PORTLAND — Struggling to try on a bulky, orange survival suit which, I'm told, could mean the difference between life and death in an emergency, I'm focusing on the fact that, statistically speaking, this seven-hour flight will be safer than my morning commute down Interstate 5.

But part of my brain insists on raising a few issues:

• The pavement on I-5 never disappears from underneath my tires, dropping 100 feet in a matter of seconds.

• The seats in my car don't have "ditching procedure" signs posted alongside, saying what to do if it ends up belly-down on the surface of the ocean.

• And perhaps most important: No one has ever called my 1999 Toyota a "Hurricane Hunter."

Hurricane Hunter is what they call the 1975-vintage Lockheed WP-3D Orion we've just boarded, and the moniker is no exaggeration: Painted on its fuselage are more than 80 red symbols with names and dates of the hurricanes into which it has flown, from Bonny in 1976 to Felix in 2007.

OK; I respect its credentials. But should we really ride into a storm in an plane built the year after Richard Nixon left office? Shouldn't an airplane that uses propellers be headed somewhere a little safer — say, the Museum of Flight?

"It's an older aircraft, but it does exactly what we need it to do," says Paul Flaherty, a project manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which operates two of these "P-3's" and is in the process of acquiring another from the Navy.

It's exceptionally sturdy, says Flaherty. It's dependable. It accommodates a wide range of scientific gear. And in rough weather the turboprop engines make it easier to maneuver.

Despite sending these planes into some of the nastiest weather nature dishes out, like the 216-mph winds of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, NOAA has never lost a P-3 or a single member of its crew.

"I wouldn't say I enjoy getting beat up in hurricanes, but it's not boring," said NOAA Cmdr. Mark Nelson, 37, co-pilot on our flight.

We seldom see these aircraft in the Northwest. They and their crews are based in Tampa, Fla., where hurricane hunting is routine business.

But for the past few weeks, this plane has been part of NOAA's Winter Storm Reconnaissance Program, making flights over the Pacific from a temporary base in Portland.

Our mission, which occurred Friday, was to get a close look at a band of weather headed toward the West Coast, a system that could generate heavy rains this week as far away as Texas.

To accomplish that, our crew dropped 16 cardboard-covered cylinders at assigned points during the flight. As the tubes fell to earth, transmitters inside sent back readings on temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed and direction.

The results not only help shape National Weather Service forecasts; they're being used in a new project to study "atmospheric rivers" — bands of low-level moisture with long-term implications for flooding, snowpack and water-resource management.

Donning the survival suits had been a preflight exercise to make sure Times photographer Erika Schultz and I could manage them if necessary. As soon as we got them on, we were allowed to take them off, though they rode the entire flight in a bin near our seats, bright-orange reminders of what could happen.

Just before departure, NOAA Cmdr. Barry Choy, the day's aircraft commander, briefed the entire crew on what-if scenarios and procedures.

Virtually every object on the aircraft is either bolted, strapped or tied down — fire extinguishers, cardboard boxes, coffee urn, binders full of paperwork. That dent on the overhead handrail? We're told it was made by a life raft that wasn't secured when the plane hit a dip.

This is no luxury vehicle. Plain metal cabinets, panels, and even the padding against the inside of the fuselage are all a government-issue shade of yellow-tan, with plenty of nicks and scratches attesting to their use.

Shortly after takeoff, Choy clicked off the "fasten seat belt" light and we could roam around the interior of the 116-foot-long plane, watching the work of each of the nine crew members — pilots, flight engineers, navigator, meteorologists, electronics technicians. About half were NOAA Corps officers, the others were civilians.

Seasoned hurricane hunters such as Steve Wade, 60, a flight engineer, track not the number of flights they've made, but the number of "penetrations" into hurricanes — and he has more than 400 in his 19 years with NOAA. A typical hurricane mission flies through the storm from several angles and at different altitudes.

"You get some serious updrafts and downdrafts. At times you feel weightless and if you weren't strapped in you end up in the overhead. ... It can be pretty unnerving," said Wade.

Nelson told of a particularly harrowing flight last year in which three of the plane's four engines shut down about 500 miles east of Newfoundland.

On that mission, with Nelson as commander, heavy seas and severe updrafts carried enough sea salt up to the plane's 3,000-foot elevation to coat the engine compressor blades, choking the engines.

In seven minutes, the plane dropped more than 2,000 feet, and it was only about 800 feet above the 40-foot seas when it went through a heavy rain shower that rinsed away enough salt to let the engines be restarted.

"For a while I honestly thought we weren't going to make it," he said.

In comparison, our 2,100-mile flight out over the Pacific Ocean was a walk in the park. Only once did turbulence prompt Choy to click on the "fasten seat belt" sign sending everyone back to their seats to ride out a bumpy patch.

At the heart of this mission was the work of Bill Olney, 40, an electronics technician, who prepared, dropped and monitored the 16-inch-long cylinders called "GPS dropwindsondes," or simply "sondes," from a French word for probe.

Worth $750 apiece but weighing less than a pound, each of these cylinders, which come wrapped in silver foil, contains a small circuit board, sensors and a little parachute to stabilize it as it falls.

At assigned points, Olney would unwrap a cylinder and place it in a tube leading out of the belly of the plane. With the flip of a switch, a hatch would open and the low pressure outside would suck the sonde away with a whoosh.

Shortly after each device left the plane, Olney tracked its readings, displayed as colored lines on a screen. Dropped from 21,000 feet, a sonde takes about eight minutes to hit the water, sending back readings every half-second.

We watched the readings from one, which showed winds drop from 71 mph on high to 9 mph at sea level. During that same fall, the temperature rose from 26 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to 50 above.

A blue line on the screen revealed the contents of the clouds below us: The sonde reported a sharp increase in humidity from 15,500 feet down to 9,000 feet.

Operating this aircraft costs between $5,000 and $15,000 an hour, depending on its mission, crew size, equipment used, fuel costs, travel expenses and other variables.

A hurricane flight, which helps plot a storm's likely track, can save some money for local governments, since it's estimated to cost more than $1 million per mile of coastline to prepare for a major storm.

But this is about more than money, said Nelson. "We feel we are absolutely saving lives," he said. "When we allow forecasters to make predictions about where a storm is going to go, how long it's going to last and how strong its winds are, they can get people safely out of its way."

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com