Frank Marks remembers the Diet Coke can floating in front of his face as the plane pitched violently. After several attempts to grab it, he gave up and focused on avoiding the other debris ricocheting around the cabin. Then an engine flamed out, and the pilots dumped 15,000 pounds (6,800 kilograms) of fuel in a last-ditch effort to climb to relative safety without overheating the three working engines. The flight miraculously landed safely in Barbados a few hours later.
Rather than swearing off flying forever, many of the flight’s passengers were back in the air 2 days later for another chance to chase the storm that very nearly killed them.
Most pilots give storms a wide berth, but those flying NOAA’s two WP-3D Orion aircraft—known as Hurricane Hunters—head right for them. Those flights yield important data about storm structure and intensity that can help protect people on the ground. “There’s only so much you can learn from remote sensing,” said Todd Lane, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the research. So scientists, pilots, and crew keep flying, despite the risks that severe turbulence poses.
New research published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society shows that Marks’s memorable flight through Hurricane Hugo in 1989 was rightly infamous—it ranks as the most turbulent NOAA Hurricane Hunter mission to date. Data from that and other bumpy NOAA Hurricane Hunter flights could make future trips safer.
The Bumpiest of Them All
Josh Wadler, a meteorologist at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., had a wild ride aboard a NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft in September 2022. He and his colleagues were flying through Hurricane Ian to study how energy was being transferred from the ocean to the atmosphere and, ultimately, into the hurricane. That Hurricane Hunter flight was by far the bumpiest of the 20 or so he’d been on, with extreme turbulence lasting for an unprecedented 10 minutes or so.
“We’re scientists—let’s try to figure this out.”
When the team finally emerged into smooth air, Wadler and others on board couldn’t help but wonder how their experience stacked up to the infamous 1989 flight through Hurricane Hugo. Being scientists, they decided to throw data at the question. “We’re scientists—let’s try to figure this out,” Wadler said.
Wadler and his colleagues mined in-flight data collected automatically by onboard navigation systems for every NOAA Hurricane Hunter flight into a tropical cyclone from 2004 to 2023. Those data, recorded every second, were already digitized and freely available online. But amassing data from two earlier flights for comparison—through Hurricane Hugo and another notoriously bumpy storm, Hurricane Allen, in 1980—required a bit more finesse. “There’s no record of them online,” Wadler said. “They’re just on tapes.”
Enter the data-wrangling skills of Neal Dorst, a meteorologist with the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami. “Back in the day we would record the flight-level data on magnetic tapes,” Dorst said. Reels of magnetic tape sit in a room just down the hall from Dorst’s office. He’s digitizing them all and processed the Hurricane Hugo and Hurricane Allen data out of sequence after a special request for this project.
For each NOAA Hurricane Hunter flight of interest, the team analyzed six different aircraft motions: three translational (forward and back, side to side, and up and down) and three rotational (roll, pitch, and yaw). For every second, the team calculated the aircraft’s acceleration and jerk—that is, the rate of change of acceleration in time—in each of those six dimensions.
“There’s a lot of folklore about that flight.”
Because rotational motion depends on position relative to an axis of rotation, the team also considered a passenger’s seat position when determining what acceleration and jerk someone on board would have experienced. “The farther away from the axis of rotation you are, the more you feel,” Wadler said. “You’re going to feel the rotational motions more in the front or back of the plane.”
When the researchers tabulated a “bumpiness index” that took into account both acceleration and jerk, Wadler discovered that his memorable flight through Hurricane Ian in 2022 ranked second to the flight through Hurricane Hugo. That finding wasn’t wholly surprising, Wadler said. “There’s a lot of folklore about that flight.”
That infamous Hurricane Hugo flight pierced the storm just 1,600 feet (500 meters) above the Atlantic Ocean. That left dangerously little airspace for maneuvering and sent the plane directly into a region of the storm known for its extreme winds. (Nowadays, NOAA Hurricane Hunters fly roughly 6 times higher.)
Different Kinds of Bumpy
The in-flight data also corroborated something that Marks and his colleagues aboard the 1989 flight remember well: Their wild ride was characterized by extreme up and down motions. “Within a minute, we went through these huge three updraft/downdraft couplets,” said Marks, a meteorologist who retired last year from the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. Wadler’s trip through Hurricane Ian, on the other hand, involved strong turbulence directed largely sideways. “The side to side motions were unique,” Wadler said.
Hurricanes Irma (2017), Sam (2021), and Lane (2018) rounded out the top five positions. Wadler and his collaborators found that turbulence tended to be stronger for large storms that went on to weaken in the next few hours. Bumpiness was also most pronounced near the inner edge of a storm’s eyewall and near features known as mesovortexes, which are basically storms within a storm.
Beyond satisfying a personal curiosity, the finding could help make future NOAA Hurricane Hunter flights safer. “We know what to look for on radar when we’re going into a mission,” Wadler said. He hopes to take this new work in the direction of crew performance and cognition. “Is there a threshold of turbulence where humans are bad at making decisions?” he wondered. But instead of taking willing participants up on flights, Wadler plans to do laboratory experiments mimicking turbulence.
—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer
Citation: Kornei, K. (2025), The wildest ride on a Hurricane Hunter aircraft,
Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250194. Published on 21 May 2025.
Text © 2025. The authors.
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.
