| In all my days of hurricane and typhoon flying, I had never seen anything like this. It looks like a huge football stadium! Actually, you are watching the storm tearing itself apart. The "stadium" part is the circulation center - it's not the eyewall. The eyewall itself is shown above the engine, continuing in the distance to the left. You can see the open sky in the upper left of the picture. It's important to note here that the altitude of the aircraft has not changed (much) from the previous photos. Technical jargon alert! We always flew typhoons and hurricanes at 10000 feet pressure altitude. In other words, the autopilot always tried to keep us at 10000 feet, but since a typhoon is a massive low pressure system, the actual altitude of our aircraft would always be less than that, sometimes as low as 7000 feet (airplanes measure their altitude using pressure, not by their actual height above the ground)! Approaching the center of a strong storm, you could feel the airplane descending, even though the altimeter stayed the same! Conversely, when exiting a storm, you could feel the engines straining to maintain a constant pressure altitude as we flew to an area of higher pressure. We would actually be climbing, but the airplane didn't know this. If the airplane had a brain, it would be very confused indeed! |
