Inside the eye of a hurricane, a pilot's perspective

It takes, you know, probably the worst turbulence you've kind of experienced and multiply it by about 10. And that's the potential that we're going into. That's the voice of Justin Kibby. He's a pilot. My job title says hurricane hunter pilot. Yeah. He flies planes through hurricanes. It's all in the name of science. He works for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These missions are for data gathering to track and study hurricane paths and movements. But Justin Kibby and I aren't talking about data. We're talking about what it feels like to fly an airplane through a hurricane. It starts to get cloudy and once you're in the storm, you'll start to hear rain hitting the windscreen. It can be very loud. It surrounds you. It surrounds the whole plane. Probably the best way to describe it is if you have ever lived in a house with a tin roof, it's hard to hold the conversation inside. These are the conditions Hurricane hunters fly through every time they go on a mission because the point of flying through a hurricane is to fly through it and get to the eye. And he was telling me about the first time he ever did that. That was 2010. We're flying into Hurricane Earl. What's the latest information we're getting about Earl, Chap? 135 mph and still getting stronger. And then I remember breaking out into the eye of the storm. Everything just kind of stopped everything. The noise stopped, the lightning stopped. It's pitch black out. You can see stars above you. It was really beautiful, serene. It was quiet and it was a holy shit moment. What just what did we just do? What just happened? And a bolt of lightning lit up the entire outbound eyewall where I could see it visually. And I was like, oh man, that's going to be scary. It was a rough ride on the way out, but I never, never forget it. It was probably one of the coolest that I've that I've been on.