It's the up and down drafts that are the problem, I quickly learned while flying into Hurricane Rita. Crosswinds, even as fast as 250 kilometres per hour, aren't a big deal to a military P-3 airplane travelling 400 kilometres per hour. But a few of the convective drafts could have easily knocked me out of my seat if I hadn't been wearing a four-point safety belt. During one particularly turbulent moment, my free arm involuntarily flew as high as my head, giving some indication of what my internal organs were dealing with.

Angry sky: the outer rainbands of Hurricane Rita seen from a plane approaching the storm. Credit: M. SCHROPE

Throughout the hurricane season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration runs these stomach-churning reconnaissance flights from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. On 23 September, I was on a flight bound for Rita, just hours before the storm hit the Texas and Louisiana coast.

Such flights are the only way researchers can accurately gather key parameters on a hurricane, such as its central pressure and wind speeds. The pilots, experienced at flying into storms most others would consider deadly, use radar to thread a path through the outer bands and to target the central eye.

We made our first pass through the infamous eyewall, typically the most powerful part of a storm, just southwest of New Orleans. What followed was mostly a complete whiteout, but after a couple of minutes of turbulence we broke out into the eye. The day before, I was told, Rita had had a classic stadium-shaped eye, with clearly defined walls surrounding an open centre. Now, as the storm was weakening substantially from its former category-5 fury, the eye was poorly defined and filled with thin clouds. Quantifying this dramatic drop in strength was one of the flight's key discoveries. We were glad to give up the better show in exchange for a weaker landfall.

The eyewall passes caused the greatest flurry of activity on the plane. A technician across the aisle from me loaded data-gathering instruments called dropsondes into tubes and dropped them out of the plane, one by one.

Our departure from the eye after the first pass was much more jolting than the entry had been, as the western wall was more intense. It was on these turbulent passes that I came closest to ‘earning my patch’, as experienced fliers say. All passengers on the hurricane flights receive a commemorative patch, but veterans say you need a pounding to truly earn it.

Yet we knew our choppy flight was much smoother than what the residents of Texas and Louisiana, many of whose homes Rita would flood, would soon experience. While airborne, we heard a report that winds in Louisiana had already reached 60 kilometres per hour. Knowing firsthand what was to come, one crew member said respectfully: “Just wait.”