OVER THE PACIFIC WITH THE AIR FORCE RESERVE >> The military’s “Hurricane Hunters” spent Monday night and Tuesday morning doing what most people back on the ground would care to avoid: flinging themselves through the eye of a tropical cyclone.

From four lengthy, turbulent passes across Tropical Storm Guillermo — and the data that this special Air Force squadron collected — forecasters determined that the storm appeared to be holding strength as it veers slightly north of Hawaii.

The marathon 10-hour flight through punishing stormy conditions was the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance squadron’s fourth such venture southeast of Hawaii since Sunday. Its crew members were scheduled for two more flights into Guillermo as the tropical storm approaches the islands this week.

The “hunters” do all this aboard the squadron’s 10 Lockheed Martin WC-130J planes, outfitted with special weather sensors and turboprop engines that allow them to tour hurricanes without losing power. Three of them are currently in Hawaii.

It’s just like a commercial passenger flight, except that instead of the compact rows of economy seats, there’s a padded cabin lined with open wiring, research equipment, levers and switches that you absolutely should not touch. Instead of an in-flight movie, you get an in-flight cyclone — and in the event of an emergency, the canvas seats hanging from the cabin walls do not become flotation devices.

Most notably, instead of avoiding the worst weather on Earth, this flight crew is gunning right for it.

On the plus side, there’s more legroom than a passenger could ever ask for.

But the storm and hurricane work that the Biloxi, Miss.-based Hurricane Hunters do is high-stakes, potentially providing life-or-death information to island residents who could be in the storm’s path.

As Guillermo hurtled toward the islands, an advisory was issued for Hawaii and Maui counties moments before takeoff Monday.

The five-member crew’s mission is to pinpoint the eye of Guillermo, revealing how far and how fast it’s traveled to help forecasters better predict what the storm will do next. They do this by repeatedly flying across the storm while taking wind, temperature and humidity readings.

With those updates, forecasters at the Central Pacific Hurricane Center aim to narrow the so-called “cone of uncertainty” of where Guillermo might strike, Air Force officials say.

These painstaking journeys to the eye of the storm can be real tests of endurance, too. Crew members spent at least six hours straight studying their computer monitors, checking weather and navigation readings as fits of turbulence jolted the plane.

“I enjoy the missions, that we’re able to see the results of our job simultaneously,” said Reserve Lt. Col. Jim Hitterman, the aircraft’s commander. He said that he’s flown about 220 flights into the eyes of some 30 to 40 hurricanes in the past 20 years.

Hitterman said his hairiest flight occurred with 1995’s Hurricane Allison in the Atlantic. The force of that storm pushed the plane into an inexorable descent, and it wasn’t clear until an altitude of about 2,000 feet that the aircraft would be able to pull back up and avoid crashing, Hitterman said.

Hitterman said he hasn’t necessarily gotten busier flying through hurricanes in recent years.

“It goes through cycles,” he said Monday, taking a brief break from work in the cockpit.

Not long after the plane passed southeast of Hawaii island, on the outskirts of Guillermo, Senior Airman Nathan Calloway deployed the first of several so-called dropsondes out of the cabin and into the sky through a pressurized tube akin to a mail chute.

The disposable devices are a couple of feet long and resemble oversize paper towel rolls — but they’re key to understanding what the storm is doing and how it’s behaving.

Equipped with small parachutes and filled with microchips and sensors, the dropsondes send pressure, humidity and temperature readings back to the plane as they descend toward the sea at about 2,500 feet per minute (28.4 mph).

During the flight, loud pops intermittently rang out across the cabin each time a dropsonde shot through the tube into the storm. Calloway deployed 17 during the flight, including rapid backups when four of them failed.

Once the devices hit the water, they’re about as useful as a waterlogged iPhone, Air Force officials say.

In addition to the dropsondes, the crews launch deep-water Navy buoys out of another tube near the plane’s tail. The buoys will study ocean conditions in and around tropical storms and hurricanes, Air Force officials said.

Three hours into the flight, as the plane descended to 5,000 feet and into the bowels of the storm, the real fun began.

Without warning, the aircraft reminded those inside of the violent conditions outside. The crew couldn’t see the storm, but they could certainly feel it.

The plane took sudden plunges, pitched, climbed and rocked like an amusement park ride gone awry. The crew’s two Navy and Marine personnel worked to trouble-shoot a problem with equipment, bracing themselves as best they could as the cabin rocked and jolted.

Calloway, the flight’s loadmaster, said that he loves his job but that the turbulence can still be “nerve-wracking.”

“You never know what you’re going to get,” said Calloway moments before the initial shaking from Guil­lermo began. He said he’s served as a dropsonde operator for six years.

The conditions persisted for the next five to six hours as the crew performed what’s called an “alpha” pattern, zigzagging through the cyclone. They shot dropsondes all around Guillermo to get a comprehensive reading.

When the plane left Guil­lermo, the ride got noticeably smoother. Several hours after this flight landed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, a separate crew was slated to take another of the WC-130Js back into the storm.

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