Luke Bredar Flies Straight into a Tornado with a GoPro Camera-Equipped Drone

Luke Bredar sits in the passenger seat of a battered old pickup truck, his gaze fixed on a set of goggles that are live-streaming footage from a drone flying hundreds of feet over the Oklahoma plains. The sky front of him is one giant gray cloud bursting with heavy, living presence, and it’s sliding down to the ground like a finger stirring up the dirt.

Bredar clutches the controls tightly, his thumbs flying over the joysticks as the drone gets closer to the tornado. He’s taking his first real shot at tracking one of these beasts from the air, not from the ground in a fortified truck like the chasers sitting next to him, but from up above, where any slightest gust of wind could knock out the feed or send his rig spinning completely off course. The squad has been driving for hours across endless fields of nothing, chasing radar blips that promise incredible action, when suddenly they have their moment, with a low rumble that vibrates right through the dashboard.

Bredar, who has built a name for himself in the freestyle flying community, contacted storm chasers Ricky Forbes and Braydon Morisseau a few months ago. The fundamental concept he had was to attach a GoPro to an FPV drone and have it fly up and collide with a tornado. Forbes and Morisseau had been through it all, covering thousands of miles while evading hail and insane high winds. They agreed to assist the rookie. They’ve established a base camp in Arnett, Oklahoma, deep in the center of Tornado Alley, where storms may be expected to rage every spring. At first, they take it slowly, with Bredar learning how to read cloud bases and locate all those wall clouds that always indicate disaster. By midday, the first funnel is down, a huge rope of wind cutting up the grass below. Bredar rips the drone out of the truck bed, and it roars to life as it begins ascending into position.

The feed abruptly focuses on Bredar’s goggles, painting a picture that no dashboard cam could possibly duplicate. Dirt and debris are whipped all over the place, as if they were caught in the twister’s pull, and the funnel’s skin is gleaming with rain. Bredar eases the drone forward slightly, and it threads its way along the tornado’s flank, where the wind buffets it constantly. You can hear the audio from the GoPro, which is a steady freight-train roar combined with loud cracks of distant thunder.

Tension rises as the funnel ropes extend, its base scraping ever broader over the road ahead. Morisseau is feverishly scanning the horizon for the parent supercell’s rain core, which has been feeding these infants all along. Bredar begins to feel a genuine twinge of worry seeping in: the drone’s signal is beginning to flicker, warning of the electromagnetic soup that is building overhead. He yanks the stick hard to the right, driving them away from the danger zone just as a downdraft smacks into the ground nearby, creating a tremendous cloud of dust that blinds the truck’s windshield.

A month passes, and the determination to complete the mission propels them north to the wide expanses of North Dakota. The radar picks up a huge supercell, a massive storm system spanning miles with hooks that clearly suggest tornado potential. This chase is now taking place beneath an early-dark sky, with the sun swallowed up by a gigantic anvil cloud that reaches from horizon to horizon. This time, Bredar has the drone prepared and ready to go from inside the car before the wheels even stop, putting on his goggles as soon as they come to a halt, ready to make the split-second judgments that come with this line of work.

What meets the camera this time is a monster far larger than anything they witnessed in Oklahoma. A multi-vortex structure, with a churning maw of wind reported to be moving at 238 miles per hour. The drone just keeps plummeting towards the eye, and as it does, we get a peek of the quiet air inside, which contrasts dramatically with the outside fury and reveals a hollow cylinder lined with all these jagged cloud shreds. Debris is lazily rotating in arcs everywhere, including shredded tires, splintered lumber, and a derailed train car tumbling into the air like a toy. The EF5 rating arrives later, the first since 2013, and is powerful enough to upend freight wagons weighing 72,000 pounds each.
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