Aircraft to fly through a wicked storm

Have the Coast Guards storm chasers do it. They fly into hurricanes all the time in C-130 type craft for NOAA and research purposes. Buncha crazy bastards. Stress........nah, they do it for a living. Hell, the Air Force pilots flying in and out of Iceland or even Minot have it as bad as well. Crappy weather is everywhere.

But ... isn't the C130 a pretty large plane; would the small town have a large enough landing strip? What about an old DC3 instead. Those things flew through all sorts of adverse conditions before the age of jets. Puma

Puma said:

But ... isn't the C130 a pretty large plane; would the small town have a large enough landing strip? What about an old DC3 instead. Those things flew through all sorts of adverse conditions before the age of jets. Puma

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I agree, the DC-3 made it's name for doing this kind of flight. It was the original glutton for punishment; push it through a storm, overshoot the airstrip and slew it into the mud, tow it out and take-off.

Yeah, but they're not actually in US military service anymore, right?

beezle said:

Yeah, but they're not actually in US military service anymore, right?

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A fair point. in fact they're in limited use these days.
If the trip is only 150 miles, helicopters could do it. But what's the feasability of flying choppers through a storm? It would also negate the need for a landing strip.

The Hercules (that's what we call the C-130 over here) is actually designed to cope with short, rugged strips.
I wouldn't want to do it in a storm, but you could also have them fly really low and dump the supplies out of the back.

Here's a couple of comments (and I used to fly, although I'm no expert about flying through thunderstorms . . . I had no desire to be), it's not so much the wind speed a plane is encountering, as it is the vertical motion of the air in a violent storm that is dangerous to an aircraft. It literally throws a plane around (stresses on the aircraft), plus there is vertical and horizontal wind shears to contend with (wind shears are always dangerous). A larger plane can fairly easily correct for just horizontal winds, even strong winds, but even big planes have trouble going in and out and through storm cells. The forces are just tremendous.

You've probably seen TV weather reports of a large storm where they point out the major cells within the storm. Modern planes are equipped with Doppler radar that lets them see the cells and avoid them for the most part. If I was writing something and wanted to shake the pilots, I would have them lose their radars. That way they're flying blind into the storm cells that could throw them up or down 5,000 feet in a matter of moments. It would be very dangerous and scary. Of course, most pilots try to avoid the problem by going around a storm, sometimes it's just not possible.

I hope that helps a little. Again, I don't claim to be an expert. I just flew my little Cessnas and Beechcrafts around, mostly in good weather.

You can't fly helicopters in storms ...

They can fly through in a NOAA hurricane chaser or other sturdy plane, like the C130 and shove the stuff out the cargo doors.

The other option, of course, would be to air-drop the stuff rather than land. Assuming, of course that the storm is between the town and the rest of the world, rather than on the town itself.