That’s crazy if true. The flight crews all have jump suits, oxygen masks, etc., available for every flight before and after COVID-19. Mechanics?
It is from the reduction of commercial flights because of less demand, Flight data and also cruise ship data go into the models. This is important over the oceans where upper air data is scarce ..can’t launch land based weather balloons...
In this case the high pressure was underestimated over the Western Atlantic pushing the storm more west
They have been flying lots of recons and upper air flight missions around the storm in recent days to get more data
and models have halting the west shift and seem to like the LA/TX border...this includes the 18z model suite just in
18Z suite tightly clustered at LA/TX border
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/storminfo/13L_tracks_latest.png
Ok, that makes more sense. I take it that recon flights are still limited over Cuban air space too.
