Tiny airplane may help predict hurricane intensity--and save pilot lives

This new plane may save the lives of pilots who are sent up into hurricanes.

My older army pilot brother was sent up into a hurricane when he was 25 years old. His plane was hit by lightening and caught fire. As his legs were burned, he bailed out at such a high height that he suffocated before his parachute reach oxygen. As a result of his death, the Army changed their parachutes to not open until they reached a safe lower level. ---BBB

October 5, 2011
Tiny airplane may help predict hurricane intensity
By Ken Kaye | McClatchy-Tribune News Service

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — It's 3 feet long, weighs 8 pounds and looks a bit like a plastic airplane model. But by next year it will be flying into the eye of a hurricane, bucking incredibly violent winds and maneuvering within 100 feet of the ocean's surface.

Its primary mission: to help the National Hurricane Center improve intensity predictions, an area where forecasters have lagged for decades. It also will help improve the accuracy of real-time storm predictions.

Called GALE, the unmanned aircraft will be launched from the belly of a hurricane hunter turboprop, initially shot out of a tube as a cylinder. Then it will sprout wings and fly into the core of a hurricane, where it will feed wind speeds and other atmospheric data into computer models that project a storm's track and strength.

"It gives us a better understanding of how the ocean is interacting with the atmosphere," said Joe Cione, project leader with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Right now, the models are guessing at what's going on down there."

The $30,000 drone, the latest weapon in NOAA's hurricane-forecast arsenal, is made of hard composites and powered by an electronic motor. It cruises at about 55 mph and can stay aloft for about 1.5 hours before falling into the ocean, never to be used again.

"We're going to be pretty much out in the middle of nowhere when we deploy these," Cione said.

The first one will be flight-tested in coming weeks; then two of them will be flown into two separate hurricanes next year. Pilots based on the ground will control them via satellite link, Cione said.

NOAA is undertaking the project in partnership with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Considering the plane is so light and hurricane winds are so strong, how is it able to fly without getting tossed asunder?

Initially, it will be dropped into the eye of a hurricane, where the winds are usually calm, said Massood Towhidnejad, a professor of software engineering at Embry-Riddle. It will remain there, collecting data, until it is almost out of power. Then it will be directed into the hurricane's eye wall, where the winds are tumultuous.

At that point, the tiny plane will become uncontrollable, Towhidnejad said.

"We're basically hoping this thing will last as long as it can," he said. "The wind forces will take over and cause it to rotate. But that's exactly what we want."

That violent rotation, he said, will become another means to determine a storm's strength and structure.

While the hurricane center has dramatically improved track forecasts, it has made little progress with intensity forecasts. That's because forecasters haven't been able to detailed information about the inner workings of the eyewall, said specialist James Franklin.

"This device has the potential to gather data we can't typically get," he said. "If the aircraft can successfully linger in the hurricane eyewall at very low levels, that would be an exciting advance."

Still, it's too early to know how much of an impact GALE will have on the "intensity forecast problem," he said.

It won't be the first time a drone has investigated tropical systems. A similarly small plane, called an aerosonde, was first flown into Hurricane Ophelia in September 2005, when it was threatening North Carolina.

More recently, a Global Hawk turbine-powered aircraft, designed to stay aloft more than 30 hours at high altitude, was deployed into some of last year's storms.

The major benefit of using unmanned aircraft: They can fly into places too dangerous for hurricane hunters and other research planes to go.

Ken Kaye writes for the Sun Sentinel.

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