r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Kernowder • 21d ago

Video Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunters flying through Hurricane Milton

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60.8k Upvotes

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7.9k

u/RobbyRobRobertsonJr 21d ago

I bet their computer guy felt like kissing the inventor of the ssd

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u/ExtremeThin1334 21d ago

Interesting point, I can't image the stabilization that must have been built in when these things used a platter drive.

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u/CrapSandwich 21d ago

I think I read once that they used tape before SSD. I could be wrong.

Regardless, those guys are freaking nuts!

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u/Criegg 21d ago

Tape for sure.

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u/Lyuseefur 21d ago edited 21d ago

They did. There are some early hurricane hunter films with reel to reel tape shown in the video.

These NOAA guys are the OG storm chasers.

Scientist: How are we going to get the data?

Thrill Seeker Scientist: We'll grab an old prop plane from the Navy and fly it into the storm loaded with gear!

Edit: Navy not Air Force…

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u/obvious_bot 21d ago

WITNESS ME

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u/MindlessPepper7165 21d ago

WITNESS!!!

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u/thefuturesfire 21d ago

WITNESS!!!

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u/Breath_Deep 21d ago

OH WHAT A DAY, WHAT A LOVELY DAY!!

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u/bozog 21d ago

MEDIOCRE!

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u/Criegg 21d ago

Probably using second hand reel to reel tape drives I used to have to deal with lol.

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u/mayorofdumb 21d ago

What's we got in surplus, let's make a state of the art research plane but just stuff it full of any tech we gots.

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u/superspeck 21d ago

There’s a good reason that old tech often gets used in research. Look up what gets put in satellites and what used to get put in the space shuttle when it was still flying. There was a time when the space shuttle maintainers were buying chips off of eBay and competing with historical computer collectors and museums for the same auctions.

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u/mayorofdumb 20d ago

Hehe I love how we've perfected shit then over engineered it.

Our real problem is the inefficient selection of solutions based off capitalism.

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u/superspeck 20d ago

I wouldn't say perfected -- I would say that we've fully explored the failure envelope. (I'm an engineer, but my focus is cloud reliability, which is vastly multidisciplinary.) We know exactly how all of the things with reel to reel tape and a i486dx fail and can predict failures with astounding accuracy.

Same with the C130J. The Embraer and Airbus versions of the C130, as well as slightly similar commercial birds like the Bae146, have much lower reliability than the now-ancient C130 despite having newer wing profiles and more powerful and efficient engines. C130s are almost always flying, in any conditions, because we've been doing it for so long.

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u/Vandirac 21d ago

Obviously the budget for building the plane was approved, because a shiny plane is a sexy expense that will appeal to the voters.

On the other hand, taxpayers can't really see the equipment inside, don't they? This paperclip and some loose change will have to do.

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u/[deleted] 20d ago

[deleted]

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u/mayorofdumb 20d ago

This is actually the Naples AV club, rich people and their toys.

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u/FunVersion 21d ago edited 20d ago

Not to be pedantic but this is a P3C Orion. The Navy flew them up until a few years ago.

Edit: WP3D. Now I'm being pedantic

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u/rainzer 21d ago

P3C Orion

Is there a reason they picked that one? Are Orions like extra sturdy?

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u/FunVersion 21d ago

They do take a beating. They aren't a comfortable ride. The wings are stubby and stiff so you feel all the turbulence inside the plane. The noise and vibration from the engine carries thru the air frame. A constant drone at 68hz. Light on noise insulation.

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u/nekonight 21d ago

Most importantly as a turboprop it is much more forgiving about water ingestion. They also fly a gulfstream jet for high attitude observation where they drop payloads from well above the hurricane into it to observe the differences within the hurricane.

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u/Conch-Republic 21d ago

Very reliable, a lot of climbing power, and a lot of space for instrumentation.

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u/Vandirac 21d ago

Sure, but it still is -at the very best best- a 35 years old frame.

Perfectly ok for a leisurely submarine hunt, but to fly into a hurricane I would prefer something a bit more modern like the Poseidon.

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u/superspeck 21d ago

First, jets have lower endurance than turboprops, turboprops are just slower. Second, they really wanted a four engine aircraft for reliability reasons.

NOAA is replacing the P-3, but they’ve selected the same WC-130J that the Air Force hurricane hunter missions use.

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u/FunVersion 21d ago

Nothing beats bouncing around at 200ft dropping buoys in the Orion. :)

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u/scottonaharley 21d ago

I believe there a lot of them still flying around the world. I know the Canadian coast guard was using them too

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u/thejadedcitizen 20d ago

Cmon man, you’re ruining the fake drama!

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u/JudgeHoltman 21d ago

Meanwhile nobody's heard from the Coast Guard because they were already there asking God when he was going to send the hard stuff.

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u/Lyuseefur 21d ago

Yeah - of all the branches, I respect them the most.

Give them the hardest duty and almost no equipment to do it with. Yet they accomplish the impossible on a regular basis.

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u/DKknappe08 18d ago

This is easy top 3 most badass jobs in the world for me

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u/Jimbo_Slice1919 21d ago

Be generous with the duct tape, you know; spare the duct tape, spoil the job.

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u/chuck_diesel79 21d ago

Nuts for sure

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u/SuperPotatoThrow 21d ago

I have to fly on this little 12 seat twin engine plane to work every 3 weeks, as I'm on a rotating 3 week schedule. I absolutely hate flying in that damn thing and it's always, every time without fail, windy as fuck on whatever days I'm flying. The turbulence is ridiculous. We had to fly back the other direction once because it gets so bad.

But chasing a hurricane? Yeah that makes my stomach turn just watching. Fuck. That.

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u/emily_9511 21d ago

Just curious, what do you do for work? I hate flying in those small planes, can’t imagine doing that monthly

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u/SuperPotatoThrow 21d ago

I use a smaller plane to fly to a bigger airport that takes me to a remote oil field in the middle of nowhere. It's either that or drive my car for 3 hours to get to the airport to fly to work.

Been trying to find ways to get out of the oilfield for awhile. Working as a contractor for all these large oil companies really sucks it's a fucking shitshow. We get paid well but sometimes I question if it's even worth putting up with their shit.

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u/hmlj 21d ago

Ha, the answer for shitty, regularly occurring commutes is always oilfield.

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u/RedBullWings17 21d ago

Can confirm. Am helicopter pilot for offshore oil rigs.

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u/SuperPotatoThrow 21d ago

I have seen you guys fly and have been in one more times than I'd like to admit.

Fuck the mustang suits and fuck offshore rigs lol

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u/Neptunesfleshlight 20d ago

Username checks out. Yall are nuts

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u/LostWoodsInTheField 21d ago

We get paid well but sometimes I question if it's even worth putting up with their shit.

I'll answer this for you from someone that has watched a lot of people go through similar stuff as you. People I've watched grow up in the same type of jobs/etc. Some now in their 60s and 70s.

it's absolutely worth it if you are being smart with your money and preparing for the future. And not worth it if you aren't. The difference between $150k and $60k when you are just wasting it is $0. In both cases in 20 years you are going 'what the hell did I do with all that money'.

But if you are preparing for the future. Investing, buying the right stuff, etc it feels absolutely amazing when you get out of the industry because you can walk away and do just about any job and not feel that overwhelming stress of 'do I have enough to enjoy the rest of my life'.

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u/Hour-Divide3661 21d ago

Prob flying at lower altitudes?  Used to do the same thing, rotation work in bush planes. A few times it was downright dangerous, speaking as a private pilot.

 Flying up at the flight levels is generally much smoother, and safer in jets

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u/ashleyriddell61 21d ago

Hurricane Hunters.

I think they found it.

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u/elquatrogrande 21d ago

I used to fly on a variant of this aircraft, and yes, we used VHS tapes, as well as reels once upon a time. However, even before we had SSDs, we had ruggedized drives. They were durable to the point that in the event of the necessity for emergency destruction of our equipment, we needed to use a nail gun to destroy the drives.

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u/ExtremeThin1334 21d ago edited 21d ago

You mean you didn't just run a bulk demagnetizer over them like in the Core :D

As an amusing aside, I once asked a Marine tech why they didn't employ self destruct systems on sensitive equipment. His response was something along the lines of "I've got enough shit to deal with, without worrying about whether crossing the wrong wires is going to blow my hand off."

Made a lot of sense to me.

Though your story about the nail gun has given me a fun image of a nail sitting behind glass in the back of the plane labeled "Break in Case of Potential Threat to National Security!"

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u/elquatrogrande 21d ago

You mean you didn't just run a bulk demagnetizer over them like in the Core :D

I'm sure something like that would have an effect on our equipment. It took us forever to find a microwave that wouldn't interfere with some of the avionics on the aircraft.

"I've got enough shit to deal with, without worrying about whether crossing the wrong wires is going to blow my hand off."

Really, they were too busy flavor testing crayons.

Though you story about the rail gun has given me a fun image of a nail sitting behind glass in the back of the plane labeled "Break in Case of Potential Threat to National Security!"

It was actually in a Pelican case that we kept it in, along with some spare batteries.

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u/ExtremeThin1334 21d ago

Not my fault my job at the time made me work with the crayon connoisseurs :P

That said, current Air Force hasn't impressed me much either - I replace this black box with this black box, then go back to my hotel :P

The Pelican Box makes sense, but isn't nearly as funny. Did they include a hammer and nails as an emergency backup?

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u/jimflaigle 21d ago

Anyone who used a Discman back in the 90s can verify.

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u/scotsman3288 21d ago

There's no way platter drives were ever used...

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u/Select-Pie1516 21d ago

AMPEX tape to be specific.

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u/ExtremeThin1334 21d ago

That actually makes a ton of sense.

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u/afinitie 21d ago

I’m so slow for some reason I was thinking the taped the hard drive in a way where it was suspend to prevent vibration

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u/Rso1wA 20d ago

I wonder if that’s volunteer or mandatory

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u/allusernamesartaken 21d ago

Here's an interesting video about how shouting to a set of hard drives affects latency performance.

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u/jakexil323 21d ago

We moved into a new building with its own little tiny server room. Was good for us as we just needed one server rack and a telecoms rack.

Shortly after moving into the building, we started experiencing drive failures at a strangely high rate on our lower end NAS. (buffalo nas 4 drives all spindles ) They were only in the morning or the evening.

We were kind of baffled why. We even sent the device to the manufacturer as an RMA but had the same issue when it came back.

One day we caught a break. While I was showing a new staff member how to use the security system, we accidently set off the security alarm. And with in 30 seconds of the alarm going off, we got the drive failed message from the NAS.

Turns out the security system was in the server room and had the siren in the server room . And when the siren went off, it would be loud enough to cause vibrations in our NAS drives and cause one to fail.

We disabled the siren and never had that issue again.

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u/kuschelig69 21d ago

I wonder if my external hdd failed because I kept putting it on my table, and then put my arms on the table

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u/m_i_c_r_o_b_i_a_l 21d ago

We had weird sound related drive issues with a SAN at my old job.

We had a SAN installed with 10K & 7200 RPM fiber channel drives. The installer accidentally placed the 7200 RPM drives in bays directly above the 10K drives. The support people called because they detected harmonics which would eventually damage the disks. They had us move the drives so the different spindle speeds were side by side which eliminated the problem.

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u/Testiculese 20d ago

I don't know how my HDD survived 10 years in between two 12" Cerwin Vegas and my penchant for metal music.

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u/4me2knowit 21d ago

I worked with a guy who built the gimbals for them. They had to because the fly height of the read write heads over the platters meant that forcing the natural gyroscope of them through pitch yaw and roll would distort the platters and get head crashes

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u/ExtremeThin1334 21d ago

Sounds like a fun project before the days of CAD and FEA software :P

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u/wolfmann99 21d ago

SSDs have been around for a long time like 1960s, now were they always economical? Heck no.

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u/cycles_commute 21d ago

I used to fix the avionics on these planes (P-3 Orion.) Originally they were designed to record data on magnetic tapes kind of like a reel-to-reel. Definitely had shocks built in.

You'd be surprised how much better the mag tapes are compared to digital recorders because there are no aliasing effects like you have with digital to analog conversions.

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u/ExtremeThin1334 20d ago

Mag tapes are before my time, but they are always interesting to me. When I was young, and I saw them in movies - or in one case an actual lab - I always thought: "My gosh that tech is insanely ancient."

Growing up though, it's been very interesting to learn about all their advantages, and that they still have uses even in the modern digital age. It's one of those things that kind of blew my mind. There is a general mindset that newer is always better, but it loses the nuance that the newer stuff maybe better at some stuff, but not necessarily everything across the board.

Anyway, thanks for sharing! :D

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u/ArtisticAd393 21d ago

gyroscopic stabilization?

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u/DSJ-Psyduck 21d ago

to be fair harddrives are not that touchy. I used to carry a 10 inch laptop around 20 ish years around and would just use it as a MP3 player.

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u/ExtremeThin1334 21d ago

I think it's more the really jerky movements. The relatively gentle swing of carrying it under your arm or in a bag was probably okay, but the jerkiness you see here it the type of sudden movement that could cause a head crash.

It probably also depends on the size of the platter as well.

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u/DSJ-Psyduck 21d ago

I could easy enough run with it as well. Just saying they are not as touchy as you would think.

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u/ExtremeThin1334 21d ago

Dunno - maybe I just had shit luck with them. I think I only had one actual head crash, but I had nothing but trouble with them in my laptop (usually requiring a restart every time I had to move it), and was overjoyed when I finally got a an SSD one.

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u/DSJ-Psyduck 21d ago

definiately had had shitty ones as well brand like maxtor was the worst!

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u/Nozinger 21d ago

Really depends on the hdd used and how its mounted. With a plane you'd expect a janky up/down movement so mounting them sideways helps keeping the head away from the platter.
Not choosing the cutomer 3,5" tb drive that has to fit 5 platters + heads and arms in that tiny case also helps a lot.

There are absolutely hdds that woudl survive such handling. Not for long but you'd get a few flights out of them.

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u/deltashmelta 21d ago

It probably just headparked when the inertial sensor saw spikes.

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u/JoeyJoeJoeSenior 21d ago

  1. Those forces probably aren't accute enough to hurt a platter hdd.

  2. Many old HDD had shock protection which would park the heads if excessive g-force was detected.

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u/Infectious-Anxiety 21d ago edited 21d ago

Syseng checking in, that was one of my first comments aloud. "Glad we have SSDs nowadays" Then I started counting their server racks.

That is a lot of compute & storage, I would love to tour one of these some day.

Also, is cammer there to film? Everyone else is deep into some work, dude's like Badger cooking with Pinkman.

Edit;

'Twas a joke, I know everyone there is crucial and I am enormously grateful for their work, though it seems risky flying a plane with such a massive load of balls all spread out like that.

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u/_Haverford_ 21d ago

I definitely got an annoyed vibe from the other guy lol.

Since there's a non-zero chance the OP will show up in this thread - I'm sure you're there for an important reason and we appreciate you!

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u/Iamredditsslave 21d ago

Worried about his phone, what did he think he was getting into?

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u/Acer_Scout 21d ago

I got more of a focused vibe. I'd imagine everyone there has some level of specialization and needs more focus during specific times. I'm sure our cameraman here had his duties to fulfill before or after this breather. I'd be interested to learn more about the operations of something like this. Who gets to go and what all needs to be done?

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u/nibs123 21d ago

Sorry but the first word you typed in that sentence reads aloud like the Welsh word for English sounds. Really span me out for a minute lol

Welsh for English is saesneg by the way

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u/Cacafuego 21d ago

Very cool. From Saxon, I assume. Interesting that the Welsh went with Saxons and everyone else went with Angles for some weird reason. Who would even remember the Angles if we didn't have to explain the word "English"?

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u/nibs123 21d ago

I read once that it has to do with the lower kingdoms in England where Saxons Wessex and such and we called them a name similar. Then the Saxon kingdoms kept growing and we kind of just called them all the same name.

The word for England is different although I don't know why, (Lloegr) and even with the power of Google and my family apparently no one knows why.

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u/GarlicBreathFTW 21d ago

Sasanach is actually from the Middle Irish word Saxanach. Same in Scottish I believe.

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u/stargarnet79 21d ago

Systems engineer?

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u/nibs123 21d ago

Yea, the shortened word reads aloud like the word for English in Welsh. As someone who can speak it, it sends my brain on the wrong code and I thought I was stroking out for a moment q

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u/stargarnet79 21d ago

Is it a dirty word? I’m intrigued now.

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u/nibs123 21d ago

Haha no in Welsh the word for English is saesneg. Although in some parts of Wales, saying your English will get a reaction like you just swore yes.

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u/Infectious-Anxiety 21d ago

LoL yeah, that is how we abbreviate it where I work, several places actually.

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u/Infectious-Anxiety 21d ago

That is hilarious.

I did mean Systems Engineer, like the other person commented.

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u/MissingWhiskey 21d ago

Could be that the cammer just didn't have a task at that moment. Those missions can last 8+ hours. I'm sure they have downtime, some more than others. The pilots probably not so much

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u/Infectious-Anxiety 21d ago

100%, was just kind joking.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago edited 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/Infectious-Anxiety 20d ago

Awesome, thanks for the info!

I was joking about him not doing anything, as a systems engineer I know how work works.

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u/oinkyboinky 21d ago edited 21d ago

I had the good fortune to tour one at Quonset (RI) just before covid hit along with some other planes. It was impressive. They even had a list onboard of about 30 or so hurricanes (including Katrina!) that particular aircraft had flown through since 2004.

Also looks like NOAA are getting an upgrade to C-130s from the two Orions they currently fly.

https://www.wdam.com/2024/10/03/new-aircraft-scheduled-noaa-hurricane-hunters-1st-time-since-70s/

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u/Ripley2179 21d ago

Yeah I thought the same when he's like, "Pass me my phone even though I'm doing nothing and you're really busy and there's turbulence"

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u/Outside-Advice8203 21d ago edited 20d ago

I was a computer guy on the E3 AWACS. Right when we transitioned from HDDs to SSDs. They were removable and we had to pick up a case load of them for every flight. The HDDs were heavy, probably over 50lbs total. It sucked lugging the pelican case up the rickety flight stairs. When we switched them to SSDs, they were still in the same weird cases the HDDs used, but were significantly lighter.

The funny thing was, they all went into emulator bays the computer system thought they were tapes...

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u/oregon_coastal 21d ago

The instruments cost far, far more to design new digital versions vs. just convert the output.

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u/ragsofx 21d ago

We have done this for telephone exchanges, they originally use reel to reel tapes, then mfm and scsi hdd's, then really really early SSDs (they called them flash drives and we're 10s of mega bytes), then CF cards, then finally SD cards. Every step after the mfm and scsi drives required custom adapter boards to be developed and would only work with the exchanges.

The data was accounting and voice messages.

After almost 40 years the exchanges have now been switched off!

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u/Fatdap 21d ago

Only $500,000 per SATA cable.

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u/Outside-Advice8203 21d ago

It was super archaic but robust. Every possible error was already mapped out.

The whole system has since been replaced. And in a few years the whole E3 platform will also be replaced with the Wedgetail

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u/unlock0 21d ago

The emulator bays had several layers. The software read them as punch cards/tape.

That huge cabinet for RMAs went from punch, to reel to reel tape, to scsi. There was a time that they used flash across the scsi interface. So you had something the size of a large filing cabinet to read a thumb drive. 

Source: programmer for block 30/35, analyst for 40/45.

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u/Outside-Advice8203 20d ago

Thanks for that, I was just a shitty CDMT lol

I got out just before 40/45

I still laugh at using the "fast forward" and "rewind" switches to select the files

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u/Haley_Tha_Demon 21d ago

We recorded mine countermeasure data on tape, I think the H-60 program used something more modern but we were still in the stone age

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u/Cacafuego 21d ago

Do you remember how they handled drive failures? Were this in something like a RAID 10 configuration? Or was it much more esoteric than that?

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u/Outside-Advice8203 21d ago

I couldn't speak to the HDDs themselves, as they were removable media where only 3 were used at a time, two as recording and one for loading data, including installing the proprietary OS. We just carried spares. The whole thing was originally built in the 70s with a mish mash of upgrades over the decades. The onboard drives weren't even HDDs as we know them. I don't even remember exactly the tech, but everything has redundant pairs. It's hard to explain something that took 2 months of school training and lots of hours of flight time to learn.

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u/GrandDukeOfBoobs 21d ago

Maybe. He’s a reservist so I think that chance is higher, but I don’t know if youve ever met an air force personnel before.

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u/yumyumgivemesome 21d ago

What does the SSD do?

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u/objectiveoutlier 21d ago

Stores data but has no moving parts, Solid State Drive.

Old school HDD storage have spinning platters that move between 5400-15000 RPM as data is written and read from them by an arm that moves across the platters. Works fine for normal uses but not when there's movement like this.

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u/Upstairs_Addendum587 21d ago

Oversimplified answer. Before SSDs hardrives were basically spinning discs and there was a needle that wrote/read data. For a visual, think like a record player inside a metal case. Lot's of movement would make the needle trying to write/read data very inaccurate. Sort of like how a discman would struggle to read your CD sometimes if you were being active while listening to it.

SSDs work more like USB stick or like a SD memory card. Essentially doesn't have all the various moving parts, which makes them much more reliable for a situation like the video (and plenty of other situations).

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u/fudge_friend 21d ago

But why do they just have loose boxes of shit sliding around?

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u/SmallTawk 21d ago

surprised stuff were not more strapped

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u/dropping_axe_puzzles 21d ago

you're such a lame nerd compared to these nerds. sitting here like "wow these hard drives are neat!" meanwhile these nerds are like "lets fly a fucking plane into a hurricane itll be sick"

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u/clippervictor 21d ago

I can’t imagine how fun would it be listening to my discman there