The flight, headed from Punta Cana to Newark via JetBlue late Monday, took off nearly five hours late, just after 7 p.m. It appeared on flight trackers as a lone craft in the middle of a swirling hurricane. It alarmed some weather and aviation watchers and prompted a question: Can you fly over a hurricane? “I’ve seen the JetBlue flight that apparently flew over Fiona and I will say that depending on the cloud top heights you CAN fly over a hurricane,” tweeted Nick Underwood, an aerospace engineer who flies into the heart of the storms. as a member of the National. The Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Hunters to collect vital data. But, he added, “it’s still not something I would recommend.” It’s not unusual for pilots to fly near or over thunderstorms and it can be done safely, forecasters and aviation experts said. Pilots can make decisions based on weather conditions in consultation with the Federal Aviation Administration and their airline experts — as was the case Monday night, a JetBlue spokesman said. The JetBlue flight landed safely at Newark International Airport just before 11pm on Monday. Flight trackers show several other JetBlue flights that passed through Fiona late Monday into Tuesday. While the FAA provides some advisory information, it is ultimately up to the airlines and their team of meteorologists to determine if a flight is safe enough for passengers. Fiona trudges to Canada as the threat to the US grows from new unrest The airline was monitoring Fiona to determine routes to safely navigate around or over the system, spokesman Derek Dombrowski said, adding that the airline canceled several flights that could not safely depart. “Each flight is planned by a team of experts who then monitor the flight progress and the weather continuously,” Dombrowski said in an email. “It is important to understand that when routing a flight both the direction and height of the weather system are factored into our decision making.” The main hazards when flying near or through hurricanes include lightning, hail, and winds, which are strongest near the center of a storm and vary in direction around it. There’s also concern about updrafts — strong vertically oriented bursts of wind that are present in every type of storm. An FAA report from 2011 warns of the possibility of “violent turbulence anywhere within 20 miles of very strong thunderstorms.” “An aircraft when it’s high enough can fly safely over a hurricane as long as it avoids the isolated storms that are sometimes adjacent to the hurricane,” a spokesman for the Professional Pilots Association, a nonprofit group through which pilots they discuss security. . But such conditions nearby probably wouldn’t make for a pleasant flight, said Randy Bass, a certified consulting meteorologist who runs Bass Weather Services. “I wouldn’t want to be on that flight,” Bass said. Fiona was a Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 110 mph at its core Monday afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Center. The data shows that its cloud height would be difficult for any aircraft to avoid. At the time of the flight, clouds around the eye of the hurricane reached 45,000 feet, while on the storm’s outer edges they were between about 33,000 and 39,000 feet, according to satellite data. Generally, Category 2 hurricane clouds reach an altitude of about 33,000 to 46,000 feet. A mapped track of JetBlue Flight 1016 from Flightradar24 shows that the Airbus A320 was flying at altitudes between about 30,000 feet and 34,000 feet when it passed near Fiona. Even for hurricane chasers, safety is one of the main concerns when planning routes to and around hurricanes. The team, which collects data used to better understand and predict hurricanes, flies Lockheed WP-3D Orion planes into the heart of storms at altitudes of 8,000 to 10,000 feet. To survey conditions above and around hurricanes, it flies the Gulfstream IV-SP aircraft at 41,000 to 45,000 feet, spokesman Jonathan Shannon said. Shannon said it would be difficult to estimate how high an aircraft would need to be above a storm to avoid turbulence, noting that “every storm can be different.” For better forecasts, hurricane hunters research storms deeply Hurricane Fiona slammed into Puerto Rico on Sunday, leaving nearly 600,000 residents without power before moving into the neighboring Dominican Republic. Hours before the flight, up to 20 inches of rain was reported on the eastern side of the Dominican Republic, where the Punta Cana airport is located, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). The NHC also warned of life-threatening flash flooding and urban flooding in the region.
