NOAA fires, then rehires crew members who flew planes into hurricanes
When a hurricane leaves the Caribbean Sea and begins a final approach toward the Gulf Coast of the United States, tens of millions anxiously await each new forecast.
Where will it make landfall? Will it drive a killer storm surge? Will it carry deadly winds and rain far inland as Hurricane Helene did last year? The National Hurricane Center's answers to these questions drive key decisions about evacuation orders and storm preparations in the hours before landfall. Those answers depend on critical information provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's hurricane hunters.
With less than three months to go until the start of hurricane season, one question worries meteorologists, emergency managers and hurricane forecast experts. Could cost-cutting measures by President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency result in delays in the hurricane hunter flights?
The firing of five probationary employees with the hurricane hunters in late February enflamed those concerns. But in the latest example of reversals by federal personnel officials, three of those employees – all trained flight crew members – have been told their dismissals were rescinded.
Before being rehired, Joshua Ripp said he'd gone through a whole range of emotions. "First I was indifferent, then I was sad, then I was angry," Ripp said. "This was the first time I've been unemployed since high school."
Essential employees fired, then rehired
NOAA is just the latest agency to reverse some of the hastily issued terminations that have come in response to Trump's efforts to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy and slash government spending.
- On Feb. 17, the Department of Energy rescinded the firings of hundreds of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
- On Feb. 22, the Department of Veterans Affairs rushed to rehire some workers.
- On March 3, several dozen employees fired from the National Science Foundation were reinstated.
The probationary employees terminated at NOAA were among thousands of probationary employees dismissed across the federal government, but no specific numbers have been provided by the White House or the Department of Government Efficiency.
In late February emails, hurricane hunter employees were among fired federal workers who told they were "not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.” On March 3, Paste BN exchanged emails with White House press office staff asking if the administration's statements that there would be public safety exemptions should have applied to the terminations.
Four days later, the three members of the hurricane hunter flight crew received emails stating their jobs would be reinstated.
But the rehires weren't enough to allay concerns in the weather and emergency management community.
That's in part because NOAA announced in a Wednesday email to staff that another 1,029 additional positions are expected to be cut as part of the DOGE-driven reduction in force. The email also addressed the previously terminated workers, saying some had been let go inadvertently, including interns working for the National Weather Service Pathways program. Those terminations also were rescinded.
NOAA has declined to comment on the cuts other than to say it remains “dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience.”
“We continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission,” wrote Keeley Belva, a communications manager with NOAA's Office of Marine and Aviation Operations in an email. Requests for comments to several U.S. Senators in Texas, Louisiana and Florida were not answered.
Reduction in force prompts concerns
The reduction in force will be the third wave of cuts to NOAA and the rest of the federal work force, including a round of employees who took the “Fork in the Road” offer, a buyout that saw the departure of tens of thousands of federal employees who agreed to leave under the condition of being on paid administrative leave until September. Another group of NOAA employees has retired.
Former NOAA officials, including Craig McLean, a former chief scientist and assistant administrator for research who left the agency in 2021, estimate the reduction in force will bring the total number of positions cut at the agency to between 15% to 20% of its 12,000 employees. That includes more than a dozen employees terminated at a hurricane modeling lab responsible for forecast improvements.
Any further loss of positions at the aircraft operations center would have negative effects because there’s not a lot of staff depth to support the critical around-the-clock coverage in the days leading up to a hurricane landfall, said former hurricane hunters and hurricane specialists.
“When you have a Cat 5 storm coming down on you on the coast or the islands, these aircraft need to keep cycling and they need people to run them,” he said. Without sufficient staff, “we can’t continue to see those planes expected to fly back-to-back to keep track on these remarkably dynamic storms.”
Essential mission of the hurricane hunters
Given the conditions they fly in, hurricane hunter research flights require full crews, with highly specialized training. The data they collect provides critical information used by the hurricane center’s specialists and the computer models that help predict hurricane track and behavior.
If a hurricane hunter flight could not fulfill a request from the hurricane center "because of inadequate staffing or maintenance, the center's forecasts of hurricane track, intensity and size would likely be degraded," said James Franklin, a retired branch chief for the center's hurricane specialists.
NOAA's two WP-3D Orion aircraft collect Doppler radar data that's fed into the models, a capability that doesn't exist in the Air Force Reserve hurricane hunter aircraft, Franklin said. "If a missed tasking occurred at the onset of rapid intensification, we could be 6-12 hours late in identifying it, delaying crucial forecast updates to emergency managers and coastal residents."
Franklin also fears the cuts to NOAA labs that work on hurricane models will delay continued improvements in modeling.
The entire emergency management industry relies on the hurricane hunter flights for a variety of reasons, including adjustments to intensification, updated evacuation procedures and the ability to more closely pinpoint landfall locations, said Jill Trepanier, a hurricane climatologist and geographer who is a professor in Louisiana State University's geography and anthropology department.
"Especially within the last decade or two when we think about the instrumentation those aircraft are carrying and their ability to get as close to the eyewall as possible, all of that provides information that we can't get from a satellite," Trepanier said.
Collecting critical information
Two of the reinstated employees, both Navy veterans, Ripp and Kerri Englert, spoke with Paste BN after their termination emails and before they learned they would keep their jobs.
When Ripp, one of four qualified flight engineers, was retiring in 2023 after 20 years in the Navy, he joined the hurricane hunters in a skills bridge program for veterans retiring or leaving the military. He was officially hired by NOAA in May 2024.
He considers himself a supporter of President Trump, and the mission to reduce fraud and waste. “I’ve been in the government a long time," Ripp told Paste BN on March 4. "I know there’s a lot of problems in government.”
However, he added: “There is no government waste at the aircraft operations center. We do more with less than anybody else out there.” What the Navy was doing with 15 people for one aircraft, the hurricane hunters are doing with six or seven for two aircraft, he said.
Those two aircraft, which fly into the eye of hurricanes, dubbed Miss Piggy and Kermit, were built in the mid-1970s.
Ripp described in simple terms why their work at the Aircraft Operations Center is important.
If you look at the hurricane center’s forecast cone graphic, the cone shrinks as the hurricane gets closer and closer, he said.
“That’s because of the data that feeds back to the hurricane center. That’s what allows the computer models to refine the track," he said. "The more times you do this and the more data you feed into the model, the farther out you can get the predicted track to become more stable.”
For Englert, a flight director, going back to work puts a long-time dream back on track. The Las Vegas native has been fascinated by hurricanes since she was 14, when she and her family rode out Hurricane Charley in 2004 in a condo during a vacation to Daytona Beach.
During last year's busy season, videos shared on social media during hurricane hunter trips into the eye of storms such as Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene were wildly popular. Even though the footage may look terrifying to nervous flyers, Englert said the crews work together to help make sure their flights "avoid the worst of the severe weather."
Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change and the environment for Paste BN. She's written about hurricanes, tornadoes and violent weather for more than 30 years. Reach her at dpulver@usatoday.com or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X.
Contributing: Joey Garrison