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"The early season Pacific hurricane was less intense than most Atlantic hurricanes, so Hurricane Bonny was a relatively safe testing ground for the new P-3," said Jim DuGranrut, deputy director of NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center in Tampa, Fla., where the P-3 is based.
DuGranrut was an electronics engineer on the 1976 flight. He is the sole member of the original crew who continues to work for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the Hurricane Hunters.
"We had been working around the clock to get the P-3 equipped with its meteorological instrumentation and ready to fly by the beginning of hurricane season. Then during the flight we were so busy making sure the equipment worked, we didn’t have time to get nervous,” DuGranrut said. “Nevertheless, we were all pretty relieved by the end of the first flight that the P-3 handled so well. It takes a lot of nerve to fly into a hurricane in an unproven aircraft.”
Peter Black, a scientist with NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Fla., was on board a companion C-130 aircraft that flew along side the P-3. He remembered that flight as a milestone.
“The sea-surface temperature data collected on our companion flight, together with the P-3 data at low, middle and high levels, showed how Bonny peaked and then weakened when it crossed the ‘cold wake’ created by intense Hurricane Annette, which had passed through the area two weeks earlier,” he said.
That same year saw missions into the centers of Atlantic-spawned hurricanes Francis and Gloria. The P-3 carried temperature probes and pressure sensors on its fuselage and a single radar in its nose that gave meteorologists on board an up-close view of storm dynamics.
In 1977 NOAA’s precious P-3 was joined by a second, and over the next two years both were outfitted with three specially designed weather radars. For the first time, scientists got a three-dimensional look at hurricanes. The system was upgraded just two years later to Doppler radar, which was the first to be flown on an aircraft.
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