Flying into Hurricanes and Tropical Storms

[flyboy]

One of my favorite missions is to fly "Hurricane Hunter" missions on flight sim. If you would like to do this, here are some things to make it more realistic.

(1) A good stable long range turboprop for low to mid altitudes or a Gulfstream G-5 to do the high altitude work.

I use Captain Sims Legendary C-130 - to me one of the best military aircraft to fly. http://www.captainsim.com/products/c130/ What you will need if you want to be realistic, is the J model add on and the following paint from AVSIM: wc-130j_53wrs.zip

Another choice would be Mike Stone's older C-130H with the following paints from AVSIM: mst_c130_keesler_weather.zip or 403rd130.zip

(2) Real world weather. Best I have found is ActiveSky. http://sales.hifisim.com/ASv6/features.htm

(3) Where to fly?? From the National Hurricane Center: Plan of the Day

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/MIAREPRPD_last.shtml? or

http://www.hurricanehunters.com/

Look for Plan of the Day on the right hand side of the site.

(4) Last but not least...Why are you flying out there?? To measure weather-variables like wind and baro pressure.

Here is a add-on gauge from AVSIM that will do that

This xml-gauge is for pilots flying weather-research flights. It measures a variety of weather variables (and stores the HI and LO values for some of them). New in version#2 is the vertical weather-spectrum recorder, which can record the weather for each 500 feet of altitude from the ground and up to FL300 (This can be useful for instance if you need to get the latest actual approach-weather, along a glideslope, relayed to a pilot coming in for a high-priority approach. It can also be used to record the weather at different altitudes inside a hurricane, or any other weather-system, and then analyze the weather-data once you are back on the ground.

Filename: jelair-hurricanehunterweathermonitor(fs2004)_176973.zip

Easy to install in any panel.

(5) Another new feature is to watch the Hurricane Hunters fly into these storms on Google Earth... Here is the link http://tropicalatlantic.com/recon/


Have Fun