Before the days of modern aeronautics, meteorologists were consumed with the need to know what lurked within the eye of the monstrous swirling vortex of wind and rain known as a hurricane.
Back then, the hurricane’s most telling characteristic, the eye, was – in a sense – covered by a patch, and the technology was not yet available to lift it.
It happened slowly, beginning with a gutsy pilot and an AT-6 Texan airplane in the middle of World War II. Shortly after, B-17 bombers were being used to probe the chaotic inner hearts of hurricanes. The war ended and the decades passed, and the airplanes were made more and more capable. Then in the late ‘70s the Muppet Show premiered on television.
Who better to bore the indifferent and menacing eye of the storm than Miss Piggy?
If it hadn’t been for her – and don’t forget about Kermit and Gonzo – Florida residents might have been ill-prepared in 2004 for the quadruple threat of hurricanes Charley, Frances, Jeanne and Ivan, not to mention almost every named storm since 1976.
Thank God for the Muppets.
Chris Landsea, a research meteorologist at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, part of the Hurricane Research Division in Miami, is adamant about how much depends on the eye-infiltrating abilities of these and other hurricane planes.
“You can only learn so much from buoys and satellites,” he says, referring to hurricane research. “We need to get in there.”
Looking at the two well-named WP-3D Lockheed Orion hurricane research aircraft as they hulk in quiet repose at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa Bay, and knowing that they have been penetrating the soppy cyclonic centers of hurricanes for over two decades, it’s hard to fathom the incredible amount of violence Mother Nature has hurled at them. The planes, named after the Jim Henson characters, the Muppets, can put another notch on their belts with the chaotic 2004 hurricane season at an end, and the six-week “stormfest” of August and September only a sopping memory.
Ordered from the Lockheed California Company in 1973 and delivered four years later to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the planes have become integral to hurricane research.
NOAA itself was created at the behest of former President Richard Nixon, and he watched it come to fruition in 1970 when the administration was created to predict changes in the oceans, atmosphere and living marine resources. Tricky Dick may be dead and gone, but the Muppet planes are still doing their part. On both Kermit and Miss Piggy’s larboard side, to the right of the main hatch, are a series of stickers, each about the size of a fist.
The stickers are all stop-sign red, and all have the same double-swirl shape of the hurricane symbol. Taking a closer look, you realize that each has its own infamous name: Andrew, Hugo, Georges, Floyd, Fran, Opal, Isabel. Over 140 such stickers grace the sides of both Kermit and Miss Piggy, each one earned Boy Scout-like badges after a successful infiltration and exit from a hurricane.
But a Muppet is only as good as the puppeteer pulling its strings, and the planes have a great deal of buttons, levers, dials and knobs that must be appropriately twiddled for things to run smoothly.
On an average flight in hurricane season aboard either Kermit or Miss Piggy, there are two pilots, a flight engineer, a navigator, a flight meteorologist, two to three engineers or electronic specialists, a radio and avionics specialist, and up to 12 scientists or media personnel.
Out of all these crew members, 35-year-old Paul Flaherty, a meteorologist and flight director for NOAA, has logged the most flight time of anyone for the nightmare 2004 hurricane season.
“Nineteen out of 23 days, one flight a day, and each flight can be as long as eight to 10 hours, which basically turns out to be a 12 to 14-hour day,” says Flaherty, grinning. “And every flight equals a day of paperwork.”