Up Where It’s Always a Cold Day in Hell

The plane belly-flops. WHOOMPF. WHOOMPF.

At 9,100 feet, we are hitting speed bumps the size of Concorde jets. Lt. Cmdr. Phil Kenul slows the plane down to 220 mph, like a driver easing up on a rough road. Every few seconds, the 32-year-old co-pilot shuts his eyes against white shimmers of lightning.

Hail clatters. The crew shouts to be heard. Icy air grips the cabin.

We are hunting thunderstorms.

Sometimes, the storms hunt us.

On nights like this, Lt. Cmdr. Phil Kennedy, 39, looks out the cockpit window to make sure the four turboprop engines are still attached to the wings.

Tonight, we fly alone in a lasso of clouds--not even the moon comes out. Alongside us, a line of thunderstorms sucks up energy and races toward Memphis.

“This is a definite minefield,” says Kennedy, the chief pilot.

The radar pulsates with images of a dozen yellow and red blobs ahead. The yellow indicates downpours; the red is Holy Cow.

On the cockpit screen, Kenul points a gloved finger between two ballooning blobs that are about to morph into one. “All right,” he says via headset. “We have to get into that gap before it closes.”

He double checks with Kennedy: Go around or punch through?

Punch through, and the pilots get a fight. Their 22-year-old plane, no bigger than a 737, against the 200-mile-long line of thunderstorms with clouds 50,000 feet high. The plane is a P-3--white with a U.S. flag emblem--the kind that the Navy uses for anti-submarine patrol. It is not reinforced for storm flying.

On this night, Kenul knows the P-3 will take a beating. The only question is how bad. A storm line can rip the yoke from the pilot’s hand, shoot hail through the engine’s intake, knock the lift out of the wings.

“It’s dynamic,” Kenul says. “It’s a living, breathing, lightning-spitting creature.”

On board, three U.S. government scientists hunker down at computers to track the storms’ behavior. They are collecting clues to look at one of science’s biggest mysteries: how lightning works. Lightning is the country’s No. 1 storm-related killer. According to the National Weather Service, more people die in lightning strikes than in tornadoes and hurricanes combined.

The scientists’ lightning research focuses on huge, organized, traveling thunderstorms--mesoscale convective systems--like the ones we are chasing. No technology beats a ride through the storm system itself to see what’s happening in the clouds--not computer models, satellites or radars. Here, in and around the Great Plains, scientists buck their way through the strongest thunderstorms in the world.

Early in the flight, a crew member reports that the thunderstorms show no sign of winking out.

“Wee-hee!” says the P-3’s chief scientist. He draws a happy face in his log to note a colleague’s reaction to the ice particle bonanza around us.

“Yee-haw!” says another scientist in shorts and a T-shirt.

At 10:30 p.m., two hours after takeoff, the storms are about to box us in. An icy blue ball of St. Elmo’s fire crackles off the plane’s nose like a Fourth of July sparkler. The pyrotechnics means we are in a bull’s-eye of an electric field for lightning strikes.

The pilots keep an eye on that shrinking gap. Both Navy-trained pilots are calm, unhurried. Kenul, tan and square-jawed, is a wisecracking new dad; Kennedy, lanky with a quick grin, lives on an apple farm with his wife in Missouri.

They decide: We will scuttle like a crab northeast against the wind.

Nose up. Air speed up.

Punch through.

Yee-haw.

Great Hurls They Have Known

The week before our flight, a humdinger of a heat wave rolled over Oklahoma. The 14-member crew had not flown in almost two weeks of shirt-soaking weather. They left Florida for this?

Stuck at an Oklahoma City hotel, the all-male crew loaded up on the happy hour buffet. Others two-stepped or hung out at honky tonks. One warm night, they drove to Charlie’s Smokehouse, a double-wide trailer on a grassy stretch of plains. “Ohhh-klahoma,” co-pilot Kenul sang in the car, “where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain . . . “

At Charlie’s, talk turned to classic hurls. Remember the National Public Radio reporter in California? Four barf bags in a little El Nino storm. What about that scientist who missed the barf bag--remember how the smell hung in the cockpit? While the all-you-can-eat ribs simmered in the smoker, Kenul tossed out the clincher: eight bags, from a scientist who flew with him in the Solomon Islands.

Over fried okra, barbecue and beer, brass tacks is this: So when do we fly?

The crew, based in Tampa, Fla., is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which studies the global environment. On the road, the NOAA crew lives for the kind of science-speak that stops barroom banter cold: dew points, millibars of air pressure, a supercell’s rear flank downdraft. But they do it in places like Ireland, Cuba and St. Croix. Earlier this year, they ferried scientists into El Nino storms above the Pacific Ocean near Monterey.

This summer, NOAA’s two P-3s will fly into the eye of hurricanes near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The crew helps forecasters on the ground predict the storms’ path. NOAA’s pilots, along with fliers for an elite Air Force Reserve unit, are the only ones in the world qualified to fly into hurricanes.

NOAA’s uniformed, commissioned officers keep their rank if they transfer to the armed services, and vice versa. The pilots train for about six years to go against instinct, shake the logic that says turn away from severe weather. Even ex-Navy or Air Force pilots sometimes balk in NOAA’s training when a commander tells them to fly closer, closer to the storm line. The Federal Aviation Administration advises pilots to avoid storms by at least 20 miles.

“Those are not things to be playing around with,” said Lloyd Crumrine, an FAA supervisor in Van Nuys and former military pilot. “I wouldn’t be punching through any thunderstorms. I don’t care who was paying me how much.”

To NOAA’s pilots, though, the Lockheed P-3 gives instant throttle and a solid ride. The plane doesn’t snap around like a fighter jet, but it’s quick on the turn.

The crew’s trickiest flights: giant thunderstorms around the Great Plains. Here, the winds are more violent than in hurricane flying. Over the flatlands, a fast column of rising air--an updraft--can shoot the plane 10 stories high per second. Here, lightning does strike twice.

Again and again, lightning bolts have ripped through the P-3’s skin, leaving burn holes the size of a half dollar. On some flights, the crew sees so much lightning that the dead of night looks like day. Kennedy, the chief pilot, has felt the impact of a thunderbolt in his chest, as if someone had fired a shotgun right next to him.

Still, how could he resist going up against such a majestic, terrible force? This is what Kennedy gets to see in a day at the office: the inside of a hurricane at midnight with a full moon turning everything silver and black. The aurora borealis--the northern lights--swishing around the plane in rainbow colors. The open ice leads of the Arctic Ocean gliding 50 feet under his nose.

In the churning clouds, when the scientists say go this way, and the radars say go that way, and the air traffic controllers say are you crazy, he must watch the danger unfolding in front of him--like a mile-wide tornado chopping up Texas range lands for an hour.

The worst moments come when the storm flies the plane, the way Hurricane Hugo did in September 1989. The crew’s supervisor was aboard the P-3 when it ran into trouble, flying too low at 1,500 feet.

Over the West Indies, the P-3, heavy with fuel, tried to plunge through the hurricane’s eye wall--a ring of thunderstorms. Spinning winds slammed the plane, which dropped 800 feet in seconds. An engine shut down. A life raft, strapped to the floor, flew up and dented the overhead handrail.

The pilot dumped fuel, and the plane managed to climb out. When the P-3 landed, the flight engineer kissed the ground. The radar man never flew again. Others staggered to the bar.

It’s a war story that every NOAA crew member knows. See, the P-3 can lose an engine, maybe two, and still hobble home. See, more than 700 hours of flight time a year, more than two decades in the air, and no NOAA P-3 has ever crashed.

Looking for Lousy Weather

In Oklahoma City, the endless no-fly days drove the crew to a Loverboy concert. To back-to-back volleyball games with strangers at the hotel. To squint into the cloudless blue sky and guess what day they would fly, what time and how long. Everyone flipped between HBO and The Weather Channel. Where was that wind sweepin’ down the plain?

Down the highway, in Norman, half a dozen scientists slumped in their swivel chairs. On this morning, the radar and satellite images showed junk: wimpy, isolated thunderstorms in Kansas. They needed the weather to get a lot worse if they were going to fly.

None of the scientists at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory wanted a major storm system to rip through neighborhoods, of course. But two years of work, and a half-million-dollar project, was riding on a cold wind.

Twenty faculty members and students from universities nationwide had flown in to work on the thunderstorm project (https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/projects/meaprs/). The lab’s 17 research partners include NASA, which is looking at sprites--above-cloud lightning that could threaten space shuttles.

Morning meeting after morning meeting, the scientists were morose: What happened to spring? A forecaster clicked to a screen with good news for the next day. “The cold air,” he told them, “she’s a-comin.’ ”

On cool spring nights, the Plains states turn into a perfect laboratory for weather scientists. Here, no mountain ranges break the force of converging winds over the flatlands.

What happens is this: Cool air blows south from Canada and collides with warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico. Borne on a fast wind, the Gulf air rides up over the cool air and forms thunderclouds. The rain evaporates into a dry air flowing off the Rocky Mountains; the air cools and sinks. The process restarts, and the storm line builds. Usually, in the complex chain of events, a sizzling electric field will touch off lightning.

Scientists don’t know much more about lightning than Benjamin Franklin did in 1752. His kite told him that lightning is electricity, and he determined that thunderclouds carry negative or positive charges. Now, scientists want to determine: How do clouds electrify and trigger lightning?

Scientists think the answer lies in bits of ice. Say a large ice particle catches up to a slow-falling smaller particle in the sub-freezing region of a thundercloud. Icy water in the cloud had frozen on to that large particle, making it big enough to bounce off the smaller one and leave a positive or negative charge. The larger the particle, the bigger the deposited charge. Also, the collision speed is important--the bigger the bump, the bigger the deposited charge.

On the P-3, scientists take measurements to assess: What combination of ice bits and icy water does it take for oppositely charged particles to electrify a cloud? How fast are the particles falling in the cloud? What are the storm conditions when lightning strikes--the wind speed and direction, the temperature and air pressure?

But first, they needed a storm.

The day after the scientists’ meeting, the P-3’s flight director circled this line on a weather bulletin: DURING THE NIGHT...A LARGE MCS/MCC WILL LIKELY DEVELOP IN THE VICINITY OF AR/TN ON NOSE OF 35 KNOT SWLY 850 MB JET.

Yes!

The cold air? She’s a-comin’.

A 10-Hour Flight

At 8 p.m., just before takeoff, at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City, the flight crew in sky blue jumpsuits and black boots wanders into the project’s rented office. The banter stops; the elan is checked.

The plan: a 10-hour flight tracking the storm line toward Russellville, Ark.

Scientist Conrad Ziegler, 46, hovers over the flight director, who is checking weather updates on the Internet. The storm line is zipping northeast from Texas with tornado-launching mesocyclones--rising, spinning tubes of air up to 6 miles wide.

Like a dentist who warns about feeling a little pinch, a crewman says, “It might get a little bumpy.”

Eighteen people board the plane: 10 crew members and eight observers, including scientists and university students. Everyone snaps on heavy seat belts and shoulder harnesses. Some observers wear earplugs to muffle the engines, which are so loud they can drown out thunder.

In case it does get a little bumpy, computers are cushioned on shock absorbers. Instrument consoles are spring mounted. The coffee pot is bolted down. At work stations, scientists and crew members sit on sliding chairs attached to rails.

In back, the galley is stocked with wheat bread, granola bars and Tootsie Pops. The restroom has a no-flush toilet and no running water. To stretch out, crew members hang from the dented overhead handrail.

Seat belt sign on.

On schedule, the P-3 takes off into a blue-gray dusk. The air traffic controller radios a warning: You know you’re headed into severe storms?

Co-pilot Kenul grins. “Roger,” he says. “That’s what we’re going to be working all night.”

In the first two hours, the P-3 lurches toward northwest Arkansas to rendezvous with three ground crews. In darkness, lightning and a downpour, researchers wait for the plane to fly overhead before launching weather balloons to measure the storms’ electric field.

The storm line gets in our way.

Seat belt sign on.

The pilots try to fly along the line, not into it. But the line doesn’t stay straight; fingers stick out.

“It’s kinda giving you the finger,” Kenul notes, just before 10 p.m.

“It is,” says co-pilot Capt. Dave Tennesen, 47, who watches the radar.

We hear the thwwwack of ice from the nose flying to the back of the P-3. Ice buildup can sink a plane.

In a couple minutes, the gap will vanish, which would leave the P-3 with no room to maneuver or turn back. Now, thunderclouds close in on us.

Kennedy checks with the flight director, who is reading radars in the plane’s nose, belly and tail. “What do you want to do with this? It’s a real mess.”

A downdraft drops the 135,000-pound plane faster than the speed of gravity. Turbulence hits like a wrecking ball.

In the dark cockpit, the full frontal lightning is so bright that even with your eyes closed, it’s like staring into the sun. “All right,” Kennedy says, his voice even. “We have to get on the other side of this.”

He trusts the radars, especially the P-3’s Doppler, which slices the wind in sections as the plane moves along the storm line. Not yet . . . not yet . . .

“Turn now,” he says.

The plane speeds up another 50 mph or so and climbs into the 90-degree turn. Later in the flight, the crew will refer to the moment as “that little bump.” The scientists call it flying into a bear’s cage.

Seat belt sign off.

The ride smooths out, and the plane climbs to about 12,000 feet. Within an hour, we reach Russellville. Monitoring balloons up.

And then high in the clouds, at the freezing or below-freezing levels, we chase ice particles.

In the unheated cabin, it’s cold and noisy, and the scientists face a long night of work. But they have their ice! Frozen columns of the stuff, clumps of snowflakes, ice a fraction of a millimeter in size.

On one screen, 35-year-old scientist Terry Schuur watches tangerine-colored images of ice and liquid drops falling through probes on the wings. In the coming weeks, he will figure out each particle’s size, shape, fall speed and electric charge.

At 1:30 a.m., Ziegler, the plane’s chief scientist, makes his way down the aisle, one hand on the dented handrail, the other holding a Diet Coke. He knows the radar shows a bow in the storm line, bent by winds, and clouds with a dome-shaped top, formed by a shot of rising air.

“The big fella,” he says to Schuur. “Still going.”

Down below, in North Texas, the storms’ 80-mph winds uproot trees. Across Arkansas, more than 100,000 households lose power. In Tennessee, the storms cause about $1 million in damage and leave one-quarter of Memphis’ residents in the dark. At the Memphis airport, air controllers abandon their swaying tower.

On most days, Schuur sits in a windowless office. When he starts to smell the rain, he runs outside to take a look. He grew up in southern Minnesota with lightning in the skies, with tornadoes ripping through towns. Now he’s in the position to do something about it--and is closer to the action than he ever imagined. Up here, the science becomes real, the way it can’t by growing cloud particles in a lab. At the end of the one-month project, the P-3 will have flown seven flights.

On a cold, dry morning, we land back in Oklahoma City after a flight through six states. Our flight is long enough to have taken us to Paris. Ground technicians check the plane for burn holes and other scars but find none.

A few days later, a new storm line will rumble across the southern Plains, and the crew will give chase. Two hours into the flight, the plane yo-yos and turns the Doppler display upside down. A gauge shows the plane is over-stressed.

Kennedy turns the P-3 around, cancels the mission and submits the plane for stress tests. It passes.

Times researcher Lois Hooker contributed to this article.