Hunters Knew Opal Would Pack An Awesome Punch

Only the most obsessed hurricane watchers had Opal on their minds in the Wiregrass in late September last year.
But 1st Lt. Scott Spitzer and The Hurricane Hunters were seeing something drastically different from their vantage point inside the hurricane.
Opal was not the comparatively minor minnow the National Hurricane Center was seeing in its forecasts, but a killer shark of a hurricane.
The data the crews from the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron provided the hurricane center from inside the eye of Hurricane Opal showed that practically overnight, it had developed from a Category 2 storm to a monster with winds approaching 150 mph.
"With Opal, the drop in pressure was the thing for us," Spitzer said.
"There is usually a couple of millibars drop in about a day. That was happening by the hour in that storm. I imagine the National Hurricane Center was pretty awake that night."
Opal, the first hurricane to sweep directly through the Wiregrass since 1985, caused more than $1.5 million in damage in Houston County alone. At least nine area counties and 38 Alabama counties were declared disaster areas. In all, Opal was responsible for $3 billion in damage in the U.S., Guatemala and Mexico.
For The Hurricane Hunters, penetrating the eye of the hurricane has been compared with the exhilaration of a wartime kill for a fighter pilot. During 1995, Spitzer's first hurricane season, he netted a phenomenal 64 penetrations.
In high school, Spitzer became interested in tropical weather after Hurricane Elena flirted with the coastline in his hometown Pensacola , Fla., before coming ashore in Mississippi in 1985.
For some, the thought of flying into hurricanes such as Opal and Erin probably seems more like suicide than a job. But The Hurricane Hunters have a phenomenal success and safety record. Spitzer, the son of the late Col. William Spitzer, a 30-year Air Force pilot, downplays the danger.
"A lot of people consider this a dangerous mission, but a lot of times I think the guys in Bosnia have a far more dangerous mission," Spitzer said. "Because nobody is shooting at us.
"Everything the storm throws at us, our crews are trained to the level where we can handle it."
Since the military began hurricane reconnaissance missions in 1944, the Air Force has lost only three planes, all in typhoons in the Pacific. In that time, the Air Force Reserve aircraft have gathered inside information - literally - on some of the most intense and dangerous storms of the century, including Hurricane Camille in 1969, Hugo in 1989 and Andrew in 1992.
"There are two factors for that," said Maj. Doug Lipscombe, an aerial weather reconnaissance officer in the 53rd WRS. "Our maintenance people baby these airplanes. That's not to say the airlines don't baby theirs because they do. But because of the importance of our mission and the danger involved in flying into these storms, the maintenance people make sure the aircraft is in top condition.
"Also, our crews are trained extensively before they go out on a mission. We are very careful not to place ourselves in jeopardy. Based on past experience, we know where we can be and where we should not be."
To appreciate how important the squadron is to accurate hurricane forecasts, one need only remember the night of Oct. 4, 1995 in the Florida Panhandle and southeast Alabama.
"Opal was one of the prime examples of why we need to be out flying," Lipscombe said. "The night before Opal struck, a number of our airplanes were flying into the storm around the clock.
"Over a 12-hour stretch of time, we observed Opal go from a Category 2 hurricane with a pressure of 948 millibars and wind speeds of 105 mph to a Category 4 hurricane with a pressure of 916 millibars and wind speeds of 150 mph.
"During that time, the hurricane center said they did not observe that on satellite. Our data coming to them every 10 seconds allowed them to make the call that Opal was strengthening and speeding up, so people were evacuated earlier along the Florida coast. Because we were out there, fewer people lost their lives during Hurricane Opal," Lipscombe said.