A pilot in US' Oklahoma encountered something he had never experienced before while flying his glider. He came face to face with a landspout tornado ¡ª and decided to hitch a ride on the upward-moving air around it.
David Evans has been a pilot for 30 years, but nothing compares to what he experienced when he was flying from Minco to Tuttle in his Sun Dancer motor glider, The Washington Post reported.?Evans took his plane to the skies on Sunday, and?captured an incredible sight on camera?as he flew around a small tornado that formed in front of his eyes.?
While the weather might not have been conducive for strong thunderstorm activity or tornadoes, but he found a landspout, a borderline tornado that forms in a way similar to many waterspouts or dust devils.? ?
"I motored around Tuttle and Minco, and then I saw some hawks. They¡¯re always a telltale sign of where a thermal might be. I started getting an indication I was getting lift, so I circled in there with them," Evans told the outlet.?
"[The thermal] was raising me up at about 100 or 200 feet per minute. Then all of a sudden that vapour?funnel started forming. It was going down and down and down, but there was no turbulence. I just kept flying around that thing," he added.?
Evans' wife, J. Evans, shared images and videos of the incredible moment to her Twitter.?
As per The Washington Post, it was unclear to Evans at the time, but apparently the funnel did have a ground circulation attached to it ¡ª making it a tornado, albeit a weak one. Winds were probably less than 75 mph, but it did stir up vegetation and hay.
While landspouts are classified as a type of tornado, it differs in several ways, the easiest differentiation being landspouts form from the ground up, while tornadoes form from the clouds down to the earth.?
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