Evening flight thru Hurricane Irene

I watched every minute of the flight on the 23rd. crazy to me

Used to do this in the US Navy in WC-121 (Super Constellation) Aircraft! At night 750' above the water! Enter the eye, then climb to 750mb level (10,000') exit the storm, fly the perimeter, taking instrument readings. And then drop down and do it all over again! Usually 12-15 hr mission!
Why the low altitude? It smoother under the clouds, and the meteorologist on board needed to have a visual on the sea surface to estimate the winds, with the landing lights on, but not extended!
Vwery precise flying, but when I left that Squadron in 1969, we had 17 years of accident free flying! I continued on to retire as a happy airline pilot
Just thought you might be interested, in "The Way it Was"

cool

...and people complain about turbulance. HA

[http://flightaware.com/live/flight/NOAA49 NOAA G4]

thats neat!

I remember when a five mile position triangle with a dot in the center was the location of that storm! Now we can determine which side of the aircraft you are sitting on!
The "Good Old Days"??? Hmmmm! No Way! These are them!
Keep up the great work NOAA and AFRES! Would love to ride along sometime!

@Ron Gilmore very interesting what you are saying. Off the cuff what was the MTBF (mean time between failures) of those R-3350s. They had a bad reputation but to this day few aircraft/engine combination give me the same pleasure as that of watching a Super Connie or a C-121 overhead at max power. Funny the sound was not quite the same on the DC-7s (manifolding and/or the shape of the nacelles, I don't know).

MTBF Is a good question. I frankly don't know! I had newly overhauled engins Fail! The PRT's (power recovery turbines were a constant source of problems! enen though tey provided an additional source of 150 hp, each,Total of 450 hp! I also flew the 3350'S on the P2V7s in the reserves!
Those wngines put out 3700 hp with alcohol injection. And I believe were more like the DC-7's engines
The Wc121's put out 3400 hp. But due to temperature and vapor pressure were losing 450 hp per engine for take off! That was a long time ago, hope I am remembering all of these figures correctly, I think they are close!

Thank you Ron.I never understood why Wright would invent such a complex -and unreliable- PRTs with clutches and gears and fluids instead of using the well proven straight forward turbochargers like the Pratts R-2800 on the DC-6 and other aircraft the most reliable aviation engine in its class.