Amateur Photog & 53d WRS/USAF Hurricane Hunter. Tweets, retweets & vague insinuations mostly mine and don’t represent DoW/DoD officially or unofficially
Mississippi Gulf Coast
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Fifth and final pass through Hurricane Melissa for our crew today. Just after noon entering from the NW corner exiting SE.
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How the sausage is made… on Monday the area of interest that would become Hurricane Nolo was identified in the Plan of the Day (POD) as potentially needing reconnaissance flights and that got the ball rolling. Crews were put together and left Keesler AFB on Tuesday for the trip to Hawaii. They stopped in California for the night and arrived Wednesday.
By Wednesday it looked like Nolo was going to be a bigger problem which would necessitate an additional crew to make the 3 hourly fixes happen on the storm around the clock. So on Thursday our crew left for Hawaii, we were originally going to stop in California but after conferring we decided to gas & go to make Hawaii in one day. It was 13+ hours in the plane but it’s a good crew and we made it to Hawaii. See pic with moon below. On our way in would could see the first mission into Nolo coming back as the second headed out.
Today is a “down” day and we go into crew rest shortly so we can take off tomorrow morning at 3 am. During that “down” period this morning we are covering the important stuff like figuring out food for the flight, so we pile in the cars and go to the grocery store and look for stuff that makes a good flight meal. Food situation secured people figure out stuff to do until it’s time to try and sleep. I went hiking along the beach cliffs with one of the weather officers.
From here it’s a pretty regular cycle of flying then having a few hours off before entering crew rest to do it again. It can be really long days but it can also be a lot of fun with a good crew. All this stuff is in the NHOP and people can see our aircraft data coming and going but figured I would try to explain it a bit.
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My trust was shattered after a brutal divorce seven years ago, it took me a few years to even think about dating. There were also a couple of the women in the squadron who really thought I should get out there and meet someone... but I wasn’t even sure how that worked. So I did the logical thing and gave them a few pictures and let them set up an account on a dating site. They seemed to have a ton of fun with it, apparently they love playing matchmaker. I didn’t really care to know any details, just pick someone they thought would be a good and let me know when and where to go on a date.
What could go wrong? Apart from hypothetical edge cases like getting drugged and waking up in an ice filled bathtub minus a kidney it was all upside. If it went well then that was great. If it went horribly then I get a hilarious story to tell at work that’s great too. They never did end up getting me any matches but the whole thing was very entertaining. I ended up meeting someone on my own… which is its own hilarious story for another day.
Do first dates make you anxious?
Dating anxiety is normal. The mistake is trying to fight it, because resisting the feeling usually gives it more power.
When you accept the uncertainty, get curious about it, and focus less on trying to be interesting and more on being interested by asking questions and paying attention to the person in front of you, you give that anxiety somewhere else to go.
This doesn’t eliminate the uncertainty, but instead of experiencing it as something to fear, you can begin to experience it as an adventure.
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Flying from Mississippi to Hawaii yesterday it was mostly clear until we got about 300 miles out from the islands. Scattered clouds became a layer at 22k feet that we skimmed across the top of. Checking satellite imagery it turned out to be an extended band from Hurricane Nolo. After crossing through that there were just smaller puffy clouds that looked interesting as we landed as the sun was setting in Kauai. Time lapse below:
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Placerville, CA
It’s a nice little touristy town and home the one of my favorite used book stores… The Bookery. Well worth checking out if you are in the area.
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If you watched the Hurricane Hunters mission brief posted yesterday I talked about the open ocean being a data sparse environment. We fly into hurricanes because it’s the only way to get the information required to improve the forecast models.
This thread by @BartGonnissen is somewhat similar. Prior to Matthew Fontaine Maury’s compilation of ship log data sailors had no data to base their routes on. His work brought huge efficiency gains to shipping. This is a very interesting thread:
nitter.net/BartGonnissen/status/2…
1/x In the 1840s, a lame American naval officer, grounded at a desk in Washington, cut weeks off the world's ocean voyages without inventing a single machine. His raw material: a warehouse of logbooks nobody had ever read. Matthew Fontaine Maury, Pathfinder of the Seas. A 🧵
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Leaving to fly hurricane Nolo in Hawaii just as @FreddyLA7 rolls into town. Feels like I just missed seeing Ferris Bueller.
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There’s a lot of really random stuff I have accumulated over the years… looking for something else and ran across this. I was not a participant of William Tell ‘86 or any other year.
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The Atlantic storm season has been dead, but that doesn’t mean things don’t move fast. Going into work this morning my day was going to be briefing a large group of retired Aircrew Flight Equipment/Life Support personnel who were coming through. Then my plan was to fly with the mission into Polo tonight. Brief went well and during the tour of the plane I get a text that the mission into Polo canx. But since TD15 is looking like it’s a threat to the big island as a major and will require 3 hourly fixes another crew is going to be necessary. So rather than pulling an all nighter I’m now getting ready to pack bags for Hawaii…
The AFE people seemed to have a good time
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About to give some version of this briefing to a group coming through the 53d WRS this morning… It’s always a bit different as I kinda make it up as I go based on time constraints and audience. But in any case the PA office had me sit down last week and record a version that’s now out on DVIDs. Hopefully I didn’t say anything stupid:
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