Jim Kossin's account of historic flight into
Hurricane Gilbert 1988

In 1988, I was a graduate student in Bill Gray's group at Colorado State University along with fellow grad students Chris Landsea and Steve Hodanish. I think it was probably ca. the 11th of September, as Gilbert reached Hurricane strength, that Bill Gray came into our offices and said that he's trying to get us onto a NOAA WP-3D flight. He knew that he was looking at a potentially classic major Cape Verde storm and wanted to get us out there away from the ivory tower to "get our hands dirty" as he liked to put it. When things were tentatively green-lighted, we rushed through the travel logistics and headed to Denver International Airport and on to Miami. Everything happened very quickly, and before I knew it, we were boarding the aircraft on 13 September.

I sat in front of the SFMR console, which was very lucky because the window at that seat was a bubble window that stuck out a bit from the fuselage and I could get amazing views above and below the plane. The flight from Miami toward Gilbert's position was uneventful but there was certainly a palpable buzz of anticipation in the cabin, especially for the three of us grad students who were swept along for the ride.

I don't recall if it was before any eye penetrations, but at some point we flew low over Jamaica and the devastation was incredible. Gilbert had recently moved right along the island's backbone leveling trees and houses. It was a sobering sight.

As we approached the first eye penetration flight segment, the discussion about whether to fly into Gilbert at 5,000' or 10,000' seemed to dominate things. I remember being a bit apprehensive when I heard the seasoned crew saying things like "wow, I'm not sure that I've ever seen anything quite like this before". Everyone clearly knew that this was something very anomalous. When the decision to go in at 10,000' was made, I have to admit that I felt some sense of relief! In retrospect, the events in Hurricane Hugo in the following year were a striking reminder of what could potentially happen to an aircraft in a rapidly intensifying storm like Gilbert.

The eye penetrations were, of course, amazing to experience. The build-up of turbulence as we headed into the eyewall, and then just at its crescendo, we figuratively "popped" into the eye. It was an incredible sensation, like flipping a switch. All went calm and bright and the eye could not have been clearer and more perfectly cylindrical. I was dumbstruck by the ocean state, even from 2 miles up.

During the radial flight legs into and out of the eye, I wanted to jot down some of the numbers that the SFMR was showing, but I couldn't get to my bag and all I had was a pencil. So I grabbed the nearest airsickness bag and wrote the numbers on that. I remember later on looking at the bag and realizing that you could draw a radial profile of the storm from it, not just from the numbers, but from the penmanship. The writing got worse and worse until it became clear again in the eye.

I'm sure that others will comment on the backstory about the pressure readings and the skepticism at NHC, but we knew that we were experiencing something very rare, and the entire day could not have been more exciting. I'm very thankful that I could be part of that historic flight.

Jim Kossin