Pilot Ivan Deroche is in his 30s but he has seen hurricanes thrice that number. That was in fact, Ivan’s opening line: “I have had a look at over 100 hurricane penetrations. I have been doing this for 10 years now.”
Deroche’s job is to enter the eye of the storms. He is a pilot with the US Air Force Reserve. And is at Aero India 2011, he is in the cockpit of the flight that I am invited to take. WC-130J, which thankfully, has a nickname — Hercules.
The crew, based in Missisippi, US, flies into the hurricane area to investigate how large and destructive the storm can be. The data is passed to government agencies who decide on evacuations and relief operations.
The military version of this weatherbird was inducted into the Indian Air Force (IAF) recently, mainly to transport special forces behind enemy lines.
This is a serious plane; no serving lime juice with peanuts, no pretense of ‘we want to make your flight comfortable’. Instead, there is a warning that we could
feel nauseous, so gulp good old water...
But after take-off, it was okay to walk into the cockpit. Thankful that I hadn’t tripped on my way there, I walked up the steps. Two pilots; to their right, a navigator who keenly monitored the radar. Since I could imagine how much of a turbulence could rock the skies between Yelahanka & Dodballapur, I chatted without guilt to the guy who turned out to be my Hundred-Hurricane man.
So which was his worst one?
“Well, they have their own personality. Hurricane Katrina maybe. Perhaps because she did the most devastation to me, my family...”
Here is a man who has seen Katrina in the eye. No Salman Khan-like swagger, but the K-word brings out the poet in Ivan: “The eye of Katrina was very impressive because she was such a large, strong storm. The eye wall looked like a cricket stadium. It goes up 40,000 feet in the air. And the wall is over 6 miles high...very impressive.”
If you had read or watched Hurricane Katrina sweep through the US Coast, you would just balk at Ivan’s description: “You have a really, really bumpy ride from the turbulence but once you have gone through it, the eye is almost always calm.. then you may see blue sky above you and sort of a calm ocean below. But, you know, you go on right through and in a few minutes, you can see the wall of the eye on the way out. And you fly back in, into the turbulence and everything goes.”
“Ivan, you make a dreadful hurricane seem beautiful?!” I say.
“Well, its something to see. You know that it comes and hurts somebody. And that’s why you fly. Our mission is to gather important data at the hurricane centre for its predictions, and how that increases their accuracy, so they have a better idea where the storm is gone. That allows them to position emergency services right outside the danger area.”
After an hour on the weatherbird, the descent begins. There is no storm brewing in the skies. I see the calm face of the man who has seen a hundred havoc-spewing hurricanes. So I ask him: “Doesn’t your family worry?”
And he says: “Oh, all the time. I mean everybody has got a mom, right? Every mom worries.”
(Vasanthi Hariprakash is a special correspondent with a national television channel).
