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As someone who has lived through some of the strongest hurricanes in recorded history you are wrong on multiple counts. Flying through the storm and the wall eye is dangerous and NOAA has lost planes to it. One of their hardened P3 had equipment and life raft ripped from their anchors [0]. There is definitely lightning and waterspouts during a hurricane. That is not reserved for thunderstorms.

This was a flight to evacuate crew who are stationed in PR. Non-rev refers to crew who are commuting or on holiday. On a typical flight a plane may turn over in a few hours but the crew may remain for 24 hours and leave the following flight. This crew was down route and needed to head back to their operating base.

[0] https://www.wunderground.com/resources/education/hugo8.asp

Non-rev refers to any non-revenue passengers. You're conflating NRSA (non revenue space available) with non-rev generally. There's also NRPS (non revenue positive space) and "must ride" flyers in that category. This flight was picking up airline personnel, not revenue passengers.

Your having lived through hurricanes on the ground is entirely irrelevant to a discussion about the safety of overflying the hurricane.

At the flight altitudes of a commercial jet none of the effects you mention happen. You need to plan your path carefully for the descent, landing, and takeoff. But at cruising altitude, hurricane winds are not a major safety concern.

> flying at cruising altitude or even through the storm is fairly harmless,

Yes, so harmless that no one does it. NOAA has to use an extremely reinforced, highly maintained fleet of P3 Orions. You've mentioned repeatedly in your parent posts that hurricanes are harmless to planes when commercial pilots in this forum say they wouldn't do it without excellent weather planning.

> You need to plan your path carefully for the descent, landing, and takeoff. But at cruising altitude, hurricane winds are not a major safety concern.

Planes have all sorts of cruising envelopes. Gulfstreams are in the 40k feet. Commercial jets cruise at 25-35K foot band. And commercial turboprops (commuter shuttles) are in the 10-20k foot band. While the first 2 won't feel the gale force winds they can experience the updrafts as turbulence. Commercial jets fly in the lower stratum of the stratosphere. There is still weather phenomena at the height, just much less than the troposphere.

Finally, the captain will avoid a hurricane even if it doesn't really affect them. They may need to decend to a lower attitude for an engine flameout, for example. And why deal with the added complication of emergency landing during a hurricane.

There are plenty of ancillary reasons to avoid overflying hurricanes when possible—such as passenger comfort, to avoid possible turbulence; or if it disables nearby diversion points in case of an issue inflight.

But people here are making wild claims that overflying hurricanes is inherently dangerous and puts lives at risk. That's factually incorrect and is what I came here to correct. You (and others) are making examples about the NOAA's Orions (which are reinforced to fly through, not over hurricanes, flying into the wildest parts on purpose), and or other turboprops which fly 10-20k ft. That's not what we're talking about here… we're talking about commercial jet aircraft which fly at 30-40k ft. Business jets fly even higher, sometimes up to 52,000ft. Just this week, I flew private in a Citation X at 49,000ft.

Hurricanes reach to 60,000 feet.

It appears from this Quora question[0] that it it is, in fact, not dangerous to fly OVER a hurricane. The keyword is over.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-dangerous-to-fly-over-a-hurrican...

NOAA does not fly their Gulfstream into hurricanes, it flies over them. They use WP-3s (strengthened P-3 Orions) to fly through the hurricane. The wind shear and turbulence can put quite a lot of stress on the airframe, it's nowhere near harmless. Crosswinds also make flying difficult, not to mention the vibration. A non-reinforced plane with a good pilot and 3-point seat belts could probably make it through, but the extra maintenance needed after would be enormous.

1) No they're not harmless, updrafts and downdrafts exist

https://www.wunderground.com/resources/education/hugo1.asp

Ok, they're not entirely harmless (e.g. if you fly into an hailing embedded thunderstorm at low altitude). But overflying one at cruising altitude is 100% safe.

E.g. the plane in this story flew through the eyewall of a hurricane at 1,500 feet. A commercial jet flies at a cruising altitude of up to 45,000 feet.

Do you have any source for your claims?

The planes regularly face 300 MPH+ winds in normal flight because of their speed.

That's not evidence that an additional 180MPH would be harmless. For one thing, those 300MPH winds are normally only in one direction.

The plane moves relative to the wind it is in. A 180mph cross wind, head wind, or tail wind only affects its ground speed.

I've been on flights from Asia to the US with a 150+ mph tailwind in the jet stream making the ground speed 700mph+. However, from the perspective of the air frame, it's still just traveling at a normal speed relative to the air it's in.

So I'll take that as a "no" that you don't have any citations or professional/academic experience to talk about airframe stress dynamics in a hurricane.

What citations would you like beyond basic reasoning skills? Planes don't fly relative to the ground, they fly relative to the air. Unless the wind is gusting from 0 to 160 (which is not how hurricanes work), there is nothing to be discussed here.

The earth rotates at 1000 MPH and you don't see people wondering if cars can handle that.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/34433/how-are-e...

Because air moves in more than one direction. Wind shear is a serious threat to passenger aircraft.

Thanks for the context. The other comments make it feel like this was extremely risky. Like "moving spacecrafts through closing doors".

You give it more context

But they give ZERO source for their claims.

It seems like you're looking for a particular point of view here.

Yeah you might be right, I just took it at face value. Also, I'm pretty unaware of the specific realities in the interaction between planes and the weather.

Thanks for pointing this out though