Flying Into Irma

Maybe the most intrepid thing I've ever done was to jump off a cliff into the cold water twenty-five meters below. It took all my courage and cost me a dislocated ankle, yet I swam out, drunken with such glory, an emotion so strong it stopped me from feeling any pain until I walked out of the sea, back onto land. I remember falling, two and a half seconds of rapture, ecstasy and a fright that I could feel to my very marrow. Two and a half seconds of not being able to regret the imminent impact with the cold waves.

When I read this article and thought of the pilots approaching the hurricane, closer every second to the colossal and deadly tempest, I tried hard to imagine how it felt. The only thing that came to my mind were those two and a half seconds, albeit likely amplified by a million.

The article opens with the sentence ‘’Some people just aren't like the rest of us, because they don't have the fear’’ I, however, don’t think that’s completely true. Fear is the most human of feelings, it is the one thing that keeps us alive and has kept us alive for 200,000 years. It’s there when we are meeting new people, when we change jobs and even sometimes when a little insect crawls over one of our limbs… So how not to feel it in a situation such as that? The astounding thing is not the fearlessness of the pilots and the crew, but the fact that despite the fear they still fly their air lab at 800 km/h into one of the biggest storms in history in order to acquire enough data to properly prepare people and, in that way, avoid far bigger disaster, human victims, and millions of dollars in damage. These pilots overcome their fear to bring us information to better comprehend the ways of nature.