Overall that was one of the more wild missions of my career… the eye was crazy shaped and closed on the first pass and then open on the second. On the third pass we had a call from the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center about a boat with an emergency beacon that was transmitting just outside the eye. We dropped down and searched for them for a bit. That’s all the wind arrows clumped together sorta in the middle. The beacon was loud but we didn’t get any response on the radio or see anything visually or with radar. Coast Guard was headed out in a helo but storm was well north by the time they made it on scene so no idea what happened with that. Then there was a bunch of severe turbulence on the open south side of the eye, clear air with nothing on radar but pilots had to do all their pilot stuff to keep us flying. Took a radar fix because the turbulence was too violent on the fourth pass. Then made it back in for one final fix before calling it a day. Pics and vids tomorrow… Our PA office got a bunch of them up on DVIDs if anybody wants to use them.

So about the egret… we were at ~9,500 in the eye and the pilot spots this egret. It’s not so close we are gonna hit it but it does go right in front of us at a slightly lower altitude. I’m busy with the radar and don’t have time to grab my camera but I did have the GoPro Max going. It’s not great footage but you can see the white speck going from right to left. I tell the weather officer he has gotta put it in the VDM for reasons… sure enough ten minutes later there are posts about it here on X.

Flying from Mississippi to Hawaii yesterday it was mostly clear until we got about 300 miles out from the islands. Scattered clouds became a layer at 22k feet that we skimmed across the top of. Checking satellite imagery it turned out to be an extended band from Hurricane Nolo. After crossing through that there were just smaller puffy clouds that looked interesting as we landed as the sun was setting in Kauai. Time lapse below:

Rain had just passed through as we took off from Keesler on a training mission this morning. The trails off the propeller tips weren’t quite as strong as I expected given the humidity but they still showed up well enough. This is at 960 frames per second… if you shoot for ten seconds it works out to be over five minutes of video.