Friday Find: Research Flight Facility, a sign of the times

The Research Flight Facility operated in that location from 1961 through 1992, but was moved to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, after the building in Miami was damaged by Hurricane Andrew.

The facility was renamed the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center in 1974, just four years after NOAA’s establishment as a federal agency within the Department of Commerce. It was moved again in 2017, from MacDill AFB to its current location at Lakeland Linder International Airport in Lakeland, Florida.

Throughout it all, the facility has played a unique and important role in helping us understand and prepare for hurricanes, the huge and often damaging storms that batter the U.S. year after year.

The specialized planes from these facilities – piloted first by highly experienced civilian test pilots and then, starting in the 1970s, by NOAA Commissioned Corps officers – have provided a wealth of data which has been used to improve hurricane forecasts and our understanding of the environment.

In 1956, before the Research Flight Facility was built, a group of roughly 20 scientists and technicians set up shop in a warehouse on the north side of Morrison Air Force Base (now Palm Beach International Airport) in nearby West Palm Beach. The group had come together after the devastating hurricane season of 1954 under the direction of the U.S. Weather Bureau (now the NOAA National Weather Service) to begin the National Hurricane Research Project (NHRP).

NHRP was directed by Robert Simpson, co-inventor of the Saffir-Simpson hurricane damage scale. The work of the project was unprecedented, and involved researchers at Morrison Field, meteorologists from a number of other Bureau sections, researchers from various universities, and aircraft and crew members from the U.S. Air Force.

Navy and Air Force planes had been flying reconnaissance missions into tropical cyclones for more than a decade prior to the start of NHRP. One of the teams had already been dubbed the Hurricane Hunters for some of their early work flying into these storms – well before modern predictive forecasting had been invented. But very little effort had been made to exploit these flights to gain scientific insights.

After the NHRP was formed, meteorologists were stationed on board the planes to guide the flights and maximize their scientific worth. Forecasters in the NHRP also worked to develop better weather instruments, and a way to automatically record collected data.

In 1959, the NHRP was moved to Miami and merged with the Miami hurricane forecast center to become the NOAA National Hurricane Center.

The Research Flight Facility sign, which currently hangs on a wall at the Lakeland facility, was a familiar sight to the pilots and researchers working with the National Hurricane Center in those first decades. Although it lacks the modern NOAA logo, it was emblematic of the agency’s mission to many who were working to understand the mysteries behind these giant storm systems.

Today, scientists continue their flights aboard NOAA aircraft, operated by the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center, continuing to build a deeper understanding of all stages of tropical cyclones. These scientists collaborate with researchers in academia, government, and the military in theoretical studies and in the development of operational tools for forecasters at the National Hurricane Center. Years of detailed research and participation in more than 1,000 hurricane and tropical storm observing flights have yielded tremendous accomplishments and insights into these destructive storms.