As I understand it, they fly in above the clouds and wind, and that's how they are able to "fly into" a hurricane.
I grew up on the coast of NC, and I have been through numerous hurricanes. The worse were actually a pair in the 90's. I lived two blocks from the ocean at the time, and my parents lived on the mainland, still close to the sound there, but much better than the barrier Islands. The first one we could hear trees snapping all night, and we had a LOT of tall, well over 100 ft. pine trees all over their neighborhood. The next morning there were down tress everywhere, fortunately many of our neighbors were already at work cutting paths through the roadways in their neighborhood. There was a giant pine tree that missed my truck by about 2 or 3 feet. The very next month another cat 4 hurricane was heading right for us again, this one was forecast to make landfall further south from us, so I was planning on staying at my place. It was forecast to make landfall sometime at night, and the morning of that day, I woke up to howling wind already blowing against my ocean facing windows. The place I lived in had two large 10 foot sliding glass doors that faced the ocean. At they were HOWLING with them boarded up! I said to myself, "there aint no way I'm staying here alone." So I stayed with my parents again. And once again it wreaked some pretty good havoc. The funny thing though was it didn't down nearly as many trees. The first one had knocked down most of the ones that were going to fall.
And ironically, my power on the beach was back on within two days, and my parents power was off for over a week. They came to my house to shower at one point. No hot water without power!
About a month later I went down south to go surfing at one of those beach towns where it had made landfall and the houses on the ocean were all devastated. The houses were all built on stilts, but it did little good. We were able to go and look into one of the houses from underneath. It was missing the bottom part of the stairs and the door, and you could see up and inside the house. You could see the "water line" up into the house on the sheet rock, well up into the stair well. You could park under these houses so it must have been well over a 10 foot storm surge, but probably closer to 15 foot. And that was just one of the houses that was standing. Many of them were wiped out. These were million dollar houses on the ocean, in the 90's! Needless to say, as much as I love the ocean, I would never own a house in this system on the Ocean even if I could! Fortunately, it's not something I have to worry about, no chance I'll ever own a million dollar house, maybe with inflation the house I live in will be one day, but I'd be dead before that! LOL!
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