A rollercoaster at a car wash that's how a veteran pilot describes his work flying hurricane reconaissance missions.

Lt. Col. Dave Borsi has flown hundreds of missions to gather lifesaving data about the direction and intensity of developing storm systems.

He is the chief pilot of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron of the United States Air Force Reserve.

The Royal Gazette recently talked with him about what it's like to work literally in the eye of the storm.

He was in Bermuda last week with 46 other weather experts for the 32nd session of the World Meteorological Organisation Hurricane Committee.

Lt. Col. Borsi helps to track storms in C-130 Hercules.

"Everyone wants to know what it is like to ride in a storm," said Lt. Col. Borsi. "We fly straight through the storms. We can't get over them.

"These storms sometimes get 50,000 to 60,000 feet in height. If we get too high, it is cold up there. It is cold enough to ice the airplane."

"We try to stay at a standard altitude level based on pressure. We fly in at 10,000 feet."

Flying through the storm, the rain often hammers down on the plane. In particularly bad storms, the rain gets into the workings of the plane.

"You get a burned paper smell," he said. "This often alarms new pilots.

"Even going through a thunderstorm you don't really smell that."

He said the flight is usually a relatively smooth roller coaster ride, but that can change in an instant.

"Every now and again for 15 to 20 seconds you have extreme turbulence," he said. "You can't focus on anything when it is like that.

"When it's like that is when you are wondering 'have the wings stayed on?'."

Lt. Col. Borsi said sudden, extreme turbulence can present a danger to the crew. Some members have to stand to work the weather equipment. Crew members have broken arms and legs after being thrown by the sudden turbulence.

"Sometimes it is so abrupt it is like driving your car off a curb," he said.

And although Lt. Col. Borsi claims to have slept through many a hurricane the aircraft carry three pilots the work is extremely dangerous.

In 1974 an airplane was lost over the Philippines during Typhoon Bess, and neither it nor its crew was ever found again.

Lt. Col. Borsi said meteorologists are doing increasingly better at predicting the path of a storm, but still struggle with forecasting the intensity, particularly when it comes to rapidly intensifying storms.

He said there will be a special project this season involving nine airplanes flying around Region Four, which includes Bermuda.

"They will be trying to figure out how the ocean is transferring its energy to the storm and vice versa. They want to know how that mixes to predict the intensity."

Lt. Col. Borsi joined the hurricane hunting squadron after ten years of active duty with the United States Air Force.

He was sent to Keesler Airforce Base in Biloxi, Mississippi where the Air Force keeps ten aircraft and 20 crew members for storm reconnaissance.

"When I got there, my first question was 'don't they do it all by satellite?' That was 12 years ago."

He has since learned first-hand that while satellites and radar are good, they can't replace experience.

"This is reaffirmed every day that there is no replacement for the reconnaissance aircraft at this time," he said. "We are constantly in there."

Computer models are continuously recalculating their predictions based on the real-time data from the reconnaissance flights.

"We are constantly truthing the solution," he said. "That is our role."

An example of this would be Hurricane Umberto in 2007. When Lt. Col. Borsi was first sent out with a crew, the authorities thought it was for a quick look around.

"There was no storm at that time," he said. "But 16 hours later it hit land as a category one hurricane."

It became one of the most rapidly intensifying storms on record.

One of the most sobering hurricanes for Lt. Col. Borsi was Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

This was the most powerful storm of the 1998 season. It dropped record amounts of rain on Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

It became the second deadliest hurricane in history when many people were killed in flooding and mudslides.

One of the casualties was a Windjammer cruise ship, Fantome.

"The ship made it to port along the coast," he said. "They were able to get their passengers off. Then they were running for shelter. Unfortunately the ship sank and the 31 crew aboard were lost.

"The authorities were asking us to see if we could locate the beacon and where that ship was at. So we were not only flying reconnaissance, we were trying to fly a rescue mission as well. We weren't able to locate anyone in Mitch."

He said Hurricane Katrina was memorable from a personal perspective, because nearly all of the people who worked at his base lived in the region, including himself.

"We had a lot of people who lost their houses," he said. "They were totally destroyed. We had no loss of life in our organisation because we got the message out for people to leave. It was amazing to me how many people had their personal belongings and houses destroyed."

Because the base is located near the Gulf Coast, they are often threatened by the very storms they are predicting.

Then they have the added challenge of flying missions, while at the same time evacuating their base and moving aircraft to safety.

Lt. Col. Borsi will be in Bermuda tomorrow as part of the Caribbean Hurricane Awareness Tour.

This is a Hurricane Awareness Month exercise that will include public talks and tours of the hurricane hunter airplanes.

"We do a lot of education about hurricanes," he said. "This is part of that. The visit is part of a ten-day trip around the Caribbean with National Hurricane Center director Bill Read.

"We will be getting the message out that preparedness is better than anything else."