Thanks pj!

Would you mind if I moved this post of yours to the trading section?

https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/6750/

I went to school with Dr. Masters(Jeff)........he was a better student than me ..... but at least  I graduated (-:

A number of us had a key to the building where the weather stuff was at. There was a huge picture window on the 2nd floor, facing the southwest.

Tornadoes travel from southwest to northeast, so it would be the perfect place to watch for funnel clouds or tornadoes. Whenever the threat for that was high, several of us would hang out there ahead of a potential event. 

When Jeff, me and another guy who's name I can't remember would first see each other, we would whistle the Wizard of Oz tune "If I only had a brain" to each other instead of saying Hi..........this was of course related to the tornado in that movie.

I flew into hurricane Gloria in September 1985 but Jeff flew into many hurricanes and almost  got killed flying into Hugo in 1989.

https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/hurricane-hunter-turbulent-flight-patricia-irene-hugo

Incredibly, every plane that has flown into these hurricanes has come back with zero fatalities. 

The crew that I went with told me about some injuries from downdrafts, one that caused a guy to get smashed into the ceiling and knocked out some teeth/broke his jaw. 

After I posted I realized that it was probably qualified for Trading. Tried to delete it, planning to post it to Trading, but couldn't figure out how to delete it. Tried editing out the title and body but it kept reappearing. So sure go ahead and move if you like. Unless what I'm about write makes it better suited where it is.

My father told me a WWII vintage war story of downdrafts and updrafts. Not sure just why, but he flew  a number of times with a one-star general, who had a B-29 specially equipped and which he piloted himself. These days of forgetting lots of more useful stuff, somehow I still remember his name... Gen. Irvine. 

Anyway the general had a reputation of being a real wild man.  On one transcontinental flight, the he decided (just for the heck of it) to fly directly into a big thunderhead. My father said the plane lurched violently, then the altimeter spun clockwise non-stop 15,000 feet or more. The plane was pummeled with hail and lighting shot all around them. He said it felt like the wings were surely going to be torn off. The next minute the altimeter reversed and spun backwards, even with the yoke pulled all the way up. Finally only a few thousand feet off the ground they came out on the other side and were able to fly on. Amazingly the plane suffered no severe damage, though my father said that parts of the  exterior looked like they had been "worked on" with a ball-peen hammer. He said that even though he saw some action on Saipan, he was never so scared as a he was during those few minutes of that flight.

Thank you so much gentleman for sharing the stories of the Untold.....

Awesomeness

Wunerful, Wunerful , Wunerful story pj!

Sorry that I just missed it until just now, after seeing your new post this morning.

When I flew into Hurricane Gloria, we were told when to get into our seats and have the seat belts on...........based on what the pilot saw on his turbulence detector on the dash. 

There was one time that I was walking down the isle and we hit a very strong updraft and I was knocked to my knees instantly. 

I was actually told several times to get back into my seat and to  put on the seatbelt..since I was euphoric and wanted to keep seeing the view from both sides of the plane and different windows.  My photographer, Dan Monahan, lost his cookies 3 times. He said that he had the flu but I'm pretty sure it was the ride.

There as another tv meteorologist there with his photographer from Pittsburgh. We joked about how a hurricane would never come close to our cities but here we were, for the purpose of getting some awesome stuff to get viewers back home to watch.

Our news director had apparently flown in airplanes 40 years earlier and was the morse code guy and had some connections. When I told him that Gloria was supposed to be the hurricane of the century, he came up with the idea of me flying into it.

My wife and I had just been married a month earlier, in August 1985. She was petrified. I never had so much fun. There has never been a Hurricane Hunter that did not come back and the pilots were/are trained for flying in extreme turbulence, so I had absolute confidence that we would do fine.

And they often fly into the worst part of the hurricane because thats the most important place to gather data!

I was in extremely good physical condition at the time but remember feeling sort of beat up on the ride back after going thru all the turbulence.