A four-engined turboprop lurches, drops and shudders through a wall of grey. Rain hammers the windscreen, the instruments blur, and the flight engineer in the middle seat works the power levers. Then, suddenly, the cockpit fills with light: blue sky above, and all around a towering ring of cloud. The aircraft has just flown into the eye of Hurricane Polo.

The clip was posted by the NOAA Hurricane Hunters on Facebook on 27 September and passed 7.4 million views within a day. It was filmed aboard NOAA’s WP-3D Orion N42RF, known as “Kermit”, during one of a series of missions into one of the most violent storms ever recorded in the eastern Pacific.

A Storm That Exploded Overnight

Polo became a tropical depression off southern Mexico on 20 September and a tropical storm the next day. Then it took off. Over the following 24 hours its maximum winds rose by 90 knots, or 104 mph, and on 22 September it reached Category 5 with sustained winds of 180 mph. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, no storm on record had gone from tropical depression to Category 5 faster.

Its central pressure ranks second in the eastern Pacific only to Hurricane Patricia, which set the Western Hemisphere record in 2015. Water temperatures of up to 32°C, two to three degrees above normal in an El Niño year, fed the storm.

Polo weakened, strengthened again to Category 5, and by the evening of 27 September was a Category 3 hurricane with 125 mph winds, heading north toward the Baja California peninsula. The National Hurricane Center forecast it to cross Baja California Sur on 28 September, pass over the Gulf of California and make a second landfall in northwestern mainland Mexico, still as a hurricane.

Why Fly Into a Hurricane at All?

Satellites see the top of a hurricane. They cannot measure its central pressure, or the wind at the sea surface under the eyewall, with anything like the accuracy of an aircraft inside it. That is the job of the NOAA Hurricane Hunters, flown by NOAA Corps officers and civilian flight engineers, meteorologists and scientists from the Aircraft Operations Center at Lakeland Linder International Airport in Florida.

Their two Lockheed WP-3D Orions, N42RF “Kermit” and N43RF “Miss Piggy”, fly through the storm itself on missions of eight to ten hours, crossing the eye again and again in a criss-cross pattern. They drop GPS dropsondes that radio back pressure, temperature, humidity and wind all the way to the sea, measure surface winds with a stepped-frequency microwave radiometer, and scan the storm with a tail-mounted Doppler radar. A Gulfstream IV jet flies high above at around 45,000 feet, mapping the steering winds around the storm.

The data go straight into the forecast models. NOAA’s Polo flights also supported rapid-intensification research by its Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory: understanding why storms like Polo explode is one of the biggest open problems in hurricane forecasting.

Who Is in the Middle Seat?

The NOAA post answers the question many viewers asked. The person sitting between the two pilots is the flight engineer, who watches the four Allison turboprops and uses the power levers to hold a steady airspeed of 210 knots through the turbulence, leaving the pilots to fly the aircraft through the updrafts and downdrafts of the eyewall. It is one of the last jobs of its kind; most modern aircraft dropped the flight engineer decades ago.

The Stadium Effect

The moment of breaking into the eye is what makes these videos so compelling. In a strong, compact hurricane, the eyewall clouds can slope outward with height, so the crew looks up at a bowl of cloud that meteorologists call the stadium effect. A second NOAA video, filmed from the nose of N43RF “Miss Piggy”, shows a full pass through Polo’s eye in real time.

The Day Kermit Nearly Didn’t Come Back

The job is not routine. On 15 September 1989 the same aircraft, N42RF, flew into Hurricane Hugo, then a Category 5 storm east of the Caribbean, at just 1,500 feet. In the eyewall an engine caught fire and had to be shut down, and the aircraft was hit by turbulence that produced loads of +5.8 g and −3.7 g, beyond its design limits. Equipment and life rafts broke loose in the cabin. The crew of 16 escaped into the eye, circled there for about an hour while dumping fuel, and climbed out through a weaker part of the eyewall found with the help of an Air Force hurricane hunter. Everyone survived. The investigation found small, tornado-like mesovortices in Hugo’s eyewall, a phenomenon not previously documented in hurricanes.

The Next Generation

The WP-3Ds have flown into hurricanes since the 1970s. In October 2024 NOAA ordered two Lockheed Martin C-130J aircraft to replace them, with deliveries planned from 2030. The US Air Force Reserve’s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, the other “Hurricane Hunters”, already flies WC-130J Hercules from Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.

Sources: NOAA Hurricane Hunters (Facebook posts of 27 September 2026 and earlier that week); NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations; US National Hurricane Center forecast discussions for Hurricane Polo; NASA Earth Observatory, “Explosive Intensification for Hurricane Polo”; PBS NewsHour/Associated Press; CBS News; Surfer; FlightGlobal (C-130J order); Wikipedia (1989 NOAA 42 Hurricane Hugo incident); NOAA and NOAA/NESDIS imagery via Wikimedia Commons.