[Watch] Incredible Video Of Pilots Flying Into Eye Of Monster Hurricane Patricia

When flight engineer Joseph Klippel took off for Mexico to collect data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday, Hurricane Patricia was still a mild tropical storm.

By the time Klippel, who is a member of NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters team and has tracked nearly 300 storms, left Texas Thursday aboard a P-3 Orion aircraft nicknamed “Miss Piggy,” Patricia had grown into a “potentially catastrophic” Category 5 hurricane set to wreak havoc on Mexico’s western coast.

But even Patricia’s then-180 mile-per-hour winds didn’t deter Klippel and his co-pilots from flying directly into the eye of the storm in NOAA’s research aircraft. Klippel posted not one but two jarring videos of the experience to his Facebook page.

Both videos show the aircraft shaking violently as Klippel and his co-pilots enter the eye wall of towering thunderstorms surrounding the storm’s calm center, completely losing visibility among the rain and clouds. In the first video, Klippel captures the plane penetrating Patricia’s eye wall and entering the eye, followed by two minutes of footage inside the eye of the storm. The second video, below, shows a similar scene.

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