Plan to transfer hurricane-hunter planes opposed

[Anonymous]

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Proposal removes them from Air Force


Saturday April 19, 2003


By Mark Schleifstein
Staff writer

Former National Hurricane Center Director Bob Sheets told fellow meteorologists and emergency preparedness officials Friday that a proposal by the Defense Department to transfer the nation's "hurricane hunter" airplanes from the Air Force Reserve to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is "absolutely wrong."

The aircraft, which would continue to be based at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss., are flown by Air Force Reserve pilots. They fly reconnaissance missions that go around and through hurricanes, including dangerous trips through the strong eye walls. Data from monitoring equipment on the planes and from dropped instrument packages is sent by satellite to the National Hurricane Center, which is part of the NOAA.

The NOAA owns a small fleet of research aircraft, but it relies on about 10 Air Force C-130 turboprop planes to do much of its reconnaissance work during hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean.

"Some people in NOAA want to do it (transfer the planes) because they're interested in building empires," said Sheets, who served as director from 1987 to 1995. "Some Air Force generals want to do it because they think they can use that money elsewhere."

But Sheets said the same concerns exist today as when a similar proposal by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was shot down by Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and other Gulf Coast members of Congress in 1990.

He said the change would require the NOAA to come up with a maintenance plan. The planes represent only a small part of the Air Force's maintenance mission, but if the Air Force were asked to continue maintaining NOAA planes, hurricane hunters would be forced to the end of the line after other Air Force planes.

Sheets also said that hurricane reconnaissance actually represents only about 5 percent of the planes' existing mission; when there are no active hurricanes, the planes are used to train Air Force Reserve personnel.

A spokesman for the 403rd Reserve Wing at Keesler said he could not comment on the proposal, and an Air Force spokeswoman at the Defense Department did not return calls Friday.

A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Bay St. Louis, whose district includes Keesler, said Taylor and Lott are again opposing transfer of the planes to NOAA, despite the proposal being part of a larger effort by the Defense Department to turn such nonmilitary duties over to other agencies or the private sector.


Public affairs

Sheets was one of five former hurricane center directors to speak on the last day of the National Hurricane Conference at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans.

Also speaking was Bob Simpson, 90, who served as director from 1967 to 1973 and helped devise the Saffir-Simpson scale that is used to describe the strength of hurricanes.

The scale, which ranks hurricanes in five categories based on their maximum surface winds, the barometric pressure at their center and the height of storm surge that might occur as they go ashore, was developed after Red Cross and other emergency officials asked Simpson for information on what individual storms might do to communities.

Herbert Saffir, a structural engineer in Miami, had come up with the beginnings of the scale, solely based on maximum winds, as a result of a similar request by the United Nations.

The scale was released publicly in 1974 by center Director Neil Frank, who incorporated it into the public advisories issued every six hours on active tropical storms. Frank, who became a weather forecaster for KHOU-TV in Houston when he retired from the center in 1987, said Friday that the introduction of the scale was just one of many efforts he made to improve communications between the center and the public.

Those changes were based on experiences he had while working as a forecaster for the center and as a hurricane researcher, he said.

When Hurricane Betsy caused widespread flooding in Miami in 1965 before crossing the Gulf of Mexico and hitting New Orleans, Frank drove down a street in the Coconut Grove community that divided flooded and unflooded homes.

"On the left side of the street, a guy was sitting in his lawn chair. His yard was immaculate, and he was reading a book," Frank said. "On the right side, I saw a house that was flooded and ran down to see what happened. A lady emerged covered with mud from head to toe.

"She put a finger in my face and said, 'Why didn't somebody tell me this would happen' and 'I would have bought that house across the street and I wouldn't have been flooded today,' " he said.

When he became director of the center, Frank said, he asked his staff how many people along the East and Gulf coasts of the United States had experienced a major hurricane.

"Nobody knew," he said. "We found out that there were then 40 million people living in coastal counties and 80 percent had never experienced a major hurricane. That number is still accurate today."

He asked the staff how long it takes to evacuate coastal communities, but that information also was sketchy. And where studies had been done, they were incomplete. For instance, planners figured it would take 12 hours to evacuate Sanibel Island on Florida's west coast. But that study hadn't factored in the effects of other nearby communities evacuating, which drove the evacuation time to 18 hours.

"At the time, we thought we were being successful if our forecasts provided the public with 12 hours of lead time," he said.

The result, he said, was a decision to bring the media -- and especially television -- into the National Hurricane Center during storms to provide the public with up-to-date information.

Sheets expanded that capability after the original center building was severely damaged during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The new center building, in addition to being able to withstand 175-mph winds, includes an area used by the director during hurricanes that's outfitted like a television studio.

The new center includes a second studio area established during the term of Director Bob Burpee where the hurricane liaison team -- made up of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, meteorologists, and other national emergency planners -- can brief local emergency managers by television during a storm. Today, said center Director Max Mayfield, such briefings save many hours that forecasters once spent relaying information to dozens of local emergency preparedness directors on the phone.

[cycloneye]

I agree 100% with Bob Sheets because those planes must stay there for the hurricane season to protect the people when a threat comes providing all the information about systems.

[Derek Ortt]

I'd personally perfer more NOAA planes as the NOAA planes have a few more instruments such as the step frequency radiometer, which allows for the surface winds to be estimated from flight level and not have to rely upon extrapolations

[Southernmost Weather]

Why couldn't those planes dedicated to the hurricane mission be outfitted with the NOAA instruments? Seems like that might be the answer. I think those aircraft should remain with the Air Force.