I first discovered planes when I was 11 years old. My dad took me to an airshow. One of the acrobatic planes had a female pilot and I was blown away – I didn’t know women could do that. From that moment I wanted to be a pilot.
Learning to fly planes was very difficult because early on I experienced motion sickness. Military flight training helps you overcome it, though. They put you in a spinning chair and then give you a task. You do that every day for a week or two, until you get used to it. After 13 years of flying, I’m now an aircraft commander at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a US government agency that does weather forecasting and climate monitoring.
Flying planes into hurricanes means we can provide emergency services with data on when and where these storms will hit land. They then work out the best way to keep people safe, and if any areas need to be evacuated. I fly through some of the strongest storms in the Atlantic and Pacific, and even the most violent turbulence is now tolerable.
Most pilots avoid the worst weather, but we fly directly towards it. Flying these planes can feel like being on a rollercoaster going through a car wash. Some updrafts are so aggressive planes have been known to shoot up by 1,500ft in a few seconds, so you go from being pinned to your seat to suddenly feeling weightlessness.
Every hurricane is unique. The most severe weather is usually around the eye, which is called the eyewall. We have to penetrate the eyewall to get to the centre of the storm, where typically the weather is better and we can do our testing. It can be up to 40 minutes of flying through terrible weather before getting to the eye. We’ll spend maybe 10 minutes in the eye, perhaps a bit longer, gathering data and working out how to get out. We penetrate it about four times with a total flight time of eight or nine hours.
It can be surreal being inside the eye of a hurricane, 800 miles over the ocean – you feel insignificant in that moment and aware of the power of mother nature. A larger eye can be as big as 30 to 40 miles wide. The smalletend to be about 10 miles wide – they are more dangerous to fly in.
Our plane holds 20 people. There are two pilots, with a third resting, although it’s quite hard to rest in a hurricane. We also have navigators, meteorologists and scientists, and loads of weather instruments hanging off the plane. Everyone works together to safely get through the storm and bring back as much data as possible.
When we’re in the eye of the storm, we drop an instrument called a dropsonde, a hard plastic tube, 16in long, that comes out of the bottom of the plane with a little parachute. It measures all sorts of meteorological data, such as pressure, temperature, wind direction and speed. We typically drop it at about 8,000 to 10,000ft.
We see the data from the dropsonde in real time and relay this to the forecasters to help predict where the storm is going to make landfall, and how intense it is going to be. Forecasters give that information to the public and local emergency response, so they know who needs to evacuate, which is critical. Our landscapes have evolved with hurricanes, so it’s not really an issue for nature – it’s about the people who are in natural hurricane paths.
I have flown through 40 hurricanes, but that’s nothing, I’m a newbie: some people have flown through more than 100. I don’t know how many I’ll get up to. As I get older I get more risk-averse – when I was in my 20s, I thought nothing could happen to me, but I now have a seven-month-old daughter. I recently asked my mom how she slept at night with me being a pilot in the military, and she laughed and said, “Welcome to the club.”
The next hurricane season starts in June, and it will be the first one since having my daughter. I have mixed feelings: I definitely want to do it for my teammates, but I’m apprehensive about being away from my family.
I often get asked about what it’s like being a woman in this field. It’s no different – I have the same troubles and fears as anyone doing it. Though I feel it’s important that my daughter sees me put on my flight suit every day.
• As told to Phoebe Weston
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