Falling from 23,000 feet, it takes the tube — called a dropsonde — about 10 minutes to hit the water. The instrument weighs less than a pound, and is the centerpiece of the day’s mission.

Equipped with a small parachute, sensors, a microprocessor, radio transmitter and GPS gear, the dropsonde measures air temperature, the dew point, and wind speed and direction as it falls toward the ocean, sending data back to the aircraft along the way.

Hogue, the aircraft’s loadmaster, checks whether the information is coming in clean. He passes it to Maj. Chris Dyke, the mission’s aerial reconnaissance weather officer, or flying meteorologist, who sits a few feet away at a special computer where he analyzes information gathered by the dropsonde and other aircraft sensors, then transmits it to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

In a real hurricane, the meteorologist would use the atmospheric data they collected to help direct the Weatherbird into the swirling storm.

The crew from the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, a reserve unit from Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi, is preparing for hurricane season. Known as the “Hurricane Hunters,” the 53rd plays a critical role gathering data inside storms to help the NHC improve its forecasting.

“Like any good reconnaissance mission, our job is to create certainty out of uncertainty,” Dyke told reporters ahead of a demonstration flight along the East Coast on April 24.

Weathering the storm

Comprised of 10 WC-130J aircraft loaded with weather-measuring equipment, the Hurricane Hunters are an exclusive Air Force mission. The unit was first established in 1943 and reactivated as part of the 403rd Operations Group at Keesler in 1993.

With 10 full-time and 10 part-time crews during hurricane season, which officially starts June 1 and runs through Nov. 30 each year, the 53rd can simultaneously fly in three separate storms from locations across the continental U.S., as well as from Hawaii and the Caribbean.

Five airmen work aboard each flight: two pilots, a navigator, an aerial reconnaissance weather officer and a loadmaster.

But the 53rd isn’t only on the hunt for hurricanes. Since 2020, crews now spend the winter tracking “atmospheric rivers,” or tropical winter storms that can dump massive amounts of rain or snow along America’s coasts.

The 53rd’s hunting has intensified as storms grow more frequent. Since 2018, the demand for winter reconnaissance flights has increased more than 600%. For hurricane season, it’s grown by 18%, according to the Air Force.

In fiscal year 2023, the Hurricane Hunters flew 93 tropical reconnaissance missions into 16 named storms, plus 48 missions during the winter.

“Those are the highest we’ve had in the last nine years, at least,” Dyke said, adding that the volume of missions in 2024 is already on track to meet or beat last year — with about a month to go before hurricane season officially begins.

In April, forecasters at Colorado State University predicted the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season will become “extremely active” due to warm seawater and less wind shear to disrupt storms. CSU believes the season will generate five major hurricanes with winds above 111 mph, out of 11 hurricanes and 23 named storms in total.

Responding to more storms leaves less time to train and maintain the Hurricane Hunters’ aging fleet of aircraft, which averages almost 23 years old. The squadron completed its transition from the older C-130H to the WC-130J in 2005, and each aircraft has flown more than 6,500 hours on average, according to Air Force data.

“They are definitely spread thin,” Maj. Gen. C. McCauley von Hoffman, deputy chief of staff of the Air Force Reserve, told reporters. “At the same time, they would now be considered an aging weapons system, with the number of hours on it. So, parts availability, all of that, is hard.”

An aircraft that flies into a hurricane has unique maintenance needs as well, added Col. William Magee, commander of the 403rd Maintenance Group. Hail is one of the biggest culprits of damage, even though planes are painted to defend against it, he said.

After flying through Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in southwest Florida as a Category 4 storm in September 2022, maintainers had to replace several components on one aircraft, including its carbon-fiber propellers.

“Even though they’re modified to take that sort of hail damage, this one was so, so rough we had to change several propellers,” Magee said. “We had to change the radome.”

Taking into account the violent shaking that the aircraft endure as a result of hurricane-force winds, the corrosive environment they’re exposed to, and the pace of flights, the challenges of the Hurricane Hunters’ unique job are threatening to prove too much for the planes.

“I’m not authorized to say when enough is enough,” Magee said. “But we are growing our storm missions at a rate of … if you were to say, ‘Today is enough utilization of our airplanes,’ about every two years, we would earn another airplane to maintain that current utilization rate.”

Tight resources can mean making tough decisions. In August, the 53rd pulled aircraft from covering a storm out of St. Croix back to Keesler so they could fly in Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 3 storm, Dyke said.

That could mean going without crucial data if a storm is prioritized over another.

“Now we’re talking about potential impacts to stateside readiness, homeland defense,” Dyke said. “If you ask the wing commander at Homestead [Air Reserve Base, Florida], the wing commander at Tyndall [AFB, Florida], the wing commander at any coastal installation, they’ll tell you the same thing. They rely on that hurricane center forecast to tell them what’s going to happen.”

Eyes on the storm

While the media flight in April saw mostly sunny skies, during an actual storm, the Hurricane Hunters launch multiple dropsondes from an altitude of about 10,000 feet, including at its eyewall and in the center, as directed by the flying meteorologist.

The Air Force says that data has helped improve the accuracy of hurricane forecasts by 20%, saving $1 million per mile of coastline. Flying in winter storms, too, has helped provide more predictive data, giving local and state officials more lead time to plan ahead on matters such as search-and-recovery efforts and when to lower water reservoirs to prevent flooding.

As the military and lawmakers increasingly worry about the effects of severe weather on military bases, the data collected by WC-130J crews can also help officials decide whether to evacuate people and assets like aircraft and ships.

Lt. Col. Stephen Pituch, the copilot on April’s demonstration flight, was the first to fly into Hurricane Michael in October 2018. Michael became the first Category 5 storm to hit the U.S. since Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Michael advanced from a tropical storm to a Category 2 hurricane in less than eight hours, and within two days had roared into a Category 5, Pituch said. Tyndall may not have been evacuated had awareness of the storm’s intensity not been adequately gauged, he added.

Tyndall, as well as several other nearby military installations, evacuated thousands of personnel and some F-22 Raptor fighters. But the base was flattened by a direct hit from Michael, which by then had strengthened to a Category 4. The base is now more than five years into a reconstruction effort that is slated to cost about $5 billion.

“That was never forecast to be more than a Cat. 1,” Pituch said.

The service announced Wednesday that it will reopen a recall program to fill as many as 1,000 mid-career commissioned and enlisted jobs, including pilots, combat systems officers, recruiters, air traffic controllers and more. The move comes as the Air Force looks to plug critical staffing holes, facing renewed tensions in the Middle East and possibility of conflict with China.

The application window for the Voluntary Retired Return to Service Program opens Thursday, the Air Force said in a release. Applications must be submitted by Jan. 31, 2026, to serve on active duty for no more than 48 months. Those selected can expect to return to uniform between four and six months after they apply.

“The VRRAD program is a strategic enabler to embrace experienced talent, tapping into a valuable resource of retired members to fill critical roles to close the gap against our peer competitors,” Lt. Gen. Caroline Miller, the service’s uniformed personnel chief, said in a release.

The program is limited to commissioned officers who held the rank of captain through lieutenant colonel, as well as former enlisted staff sergeants through senior master sergeants. Retirees who served in the medical, legal and chaplain corps — known as “non-line” officers — are ineligible to return.

While anyone who is eligible may apply, regardless of the job they held while in uniform, the Air Force is focusing on bringing back a range of commissioned roles, from pilots and combat systems officers to cyber specialists, contracting officers and more. The service also wants to staff up its enlisted corps in fields like recruiting, air traffic control, security forces, health care and others.

A briefing about the program circulated on social media Tuesday added that airmen who return under the VRRAD program are ineligible for aviation bonuses, and will only deploy unless they volunteer or are assigned to a combat unit. They must also meet performance standards, including physical fitness requirements, and could also be subject to a permanent change of station. They are ineligible to extend their service, or to sign up for the Skillbridge job-transition program.

Retirement benefits will cease the day before a retiree reactivates. Formerly enlisted personnel must not be medically retired, or have retired in the face of administrative or adverse actions, including pending courts-martial, be under age 60 and able to receive a security clearance meeting requirements of the position. Commissioned officers must meet similar requirements, and must not have retired because of selective early retirement. Pilots seeking re-entry must have been certified on an Air Force aircraft within the last decade, said Master Sgt. Deana Heitzman, an Air Force spokesperson.

The Air Force last reopened active duty jobs to former airmen from 2017 through 2021. In 2017, an executive order issued by then-President Donald Trump sought to bring back as many as 1,000 pilots as the service struggled to compete with commercial airlines.

The program was expanded in 2018 during a 2,000-pilot shortfall. In 2019, Air Force Times found that the program had received only 125 applicants, 50 of whom were pilots.

Inviting retired airmen back into the fray is another lever the Air Force has opted to pull to rebalance its workforce as recruitment slows and operational demands continue to rise. The service has also offered a slew of incentives to keep the current force in uniform, from retention bonuses to basing flexibility.

Col. Nick Hague will pilot SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission, which will carry four crew members aboard the company’s Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station sometime in August or later, the service announced Wednesday.

Hague will serve as a flight engineer aboard the ISS, where he and the other astronauts will spend six months completing research and the daily work of running the orbital outpost.

He’ll join others already aboard the ISS to live in zero-gravity alongside his Crew-9 teammates, American astronauts Commander Zena Cardman and Mission Specialist Stephanie Wilson, and Roscomos cosmonaut Mission Specialist Aleksandr Gorbunov.

While the trip is a first step for the Space Force, it may feel like less of a giant leap for Hague.

Picked by NASA as an astronaut in 2013, this will be Hague’s third launch and second mission to the space station. His first attempted trip to the space station in 2018 was aborted after a rocket booster malfunction; in 2019, Hague served as the flight engineer at the ISS for 203 days, during which he spent nearly 20 hours on three spacewalks and performed hundreds of scientific experiments.

After returning home from orbit in October 2019, Hague became the newly created Space Force’s director of test and evaluation. He officially transferred to the service from the Air Force in 2021.

Hague is a 1998 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in astronautical engineering. About two-thirds of NASA astronauts have served in the military, the Space Force said.

“Being a part of this mission is a unique honor, but it’s truly a collective effort,” Hague said. “Guardians worldwide ensure safe and secure operations of critical systems for launch and on station. From GPS satellites that underpin our station navigation systems, to space domain awareness sites around the globe that help NASA prevent orbital debris from colliding with the space station, to the launch range that my crew will use when we liftoff, guardians provide critical support without which our NASA human spaceflight program wouldn’t be possible.”

The Crew-9 mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, designed to shuttle workers to and from the ISS, where scientists are researching the challenges of long-duration space flight.

For now, the rest of the Space Force will remain firmly on the ground.

The Government Accountability Office’s managing director for congressional relations, A. Nicole Clowers, confirmed the probe in a Dec. 19 letter in response to a request from House Armed Services Committee members Reps. Mike Waltz and John Garamendi. Air Force Times obtained the letter Wednesday.

“GAO accepts your request as work that is within the scope of its authority,” Clowers wrote to Waltz, a Florida Republican who chairs HASC’s readiness subcommittee, and Garamendi, a California Democrat who serves as the panel’s ranking member. The pair urged the watchdog to look into the Osprey’s safety history Dec. 7.

Waltz and Garamendi asked the office to consider trends among the tiltrotor aircraft’s multiple accidents over the past three decades; maintenance and supply issues that may hurt the Osprey’s mission readiness; and risk management across the fleet, which spans the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

“We believe an assessment of the above issues, and any recommendations GAO may have, will assist us as we conduct oversight on DOD to ensure our military is achieving the required level of readiness while keeping our service members safe,” the lawmakers wrote.

Chuck Young, a GAO spokesperson, told Air Force Times Wednesday that the agency expects the probe to begin soon but did not say how long the work may take.

The Nov. 29 crash of a Japan-based Air Force CV-22, which went down during a training mission off of Japan’s Yakushima island, is the latest in a deadly string of Osprey incidents that have killed twenty U.S. troops since March 2022.

The Air Force has said that an aircraft malfunction, not a mistake by the crew, likely caused the crash. The accident marks the deadliest Air Force mishap since 2018.

The incident prompted the U.S. military to indefinitely ground its entire fleet of hundreds of V-22 Ospreys while the Air Force searches for answers about the latest fatal incident. It has also prompted the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability to launch its own investigation into the Osprey program.

A multinational search effort has recovered the remains of seven airmen from the crash so far; a search for the eighth airman, Maj. Eric Spendlove, is still ongoing, Air Force Special Operations Command spokesperson Lt. Col. Rebecca Heyse said Wednesday.

The Air Force announced Jan. 3 that it had recovered the intact flight data recorder, or “black box,” from the downed Osprey. The service has not yet released any details of its contents.