"Hurricane hunters" from the Air Force Reserve took to the skies yesterday for their first flights through Felicia, going eye to eye with the Category 1 hurricane that threatens to bring a foot of rain and high winds to Hawai'i starting tomorrow afternoon.

What they found was a Felicia that stubbornly persisted as a hurricane, though weather forecasters expect it will be downgraded sometime today.

The mission took off from Hickam Air Force Base at 4:50 a.m. and took three hours just to reach Felicia.

When the hurricane hunters flew through the storm for the first time to gather data, Felicia no longer had a well-formed eye, but its winds weren't backing off.

"The past few days, it has been dying off. Right now, it's pretty stable," said Capt. Tobi Baker, charged with "aerial recon weather ops" aboard the flight.

The continued uncertainty of Hurricane Felicia's forecast intensity and track through the Islands has officials preparing for heavy flooding and damaging winds — and urging residents to do the same.

By tomorrow, the weather service said, Felicia has a 60 percent probability of being a tropical storm and a 25 percent probability of being downgraded to a depression. There's a 10 percent chance that it will remain a hurricane, and a 5 percent chance it could dissipate.

But even if Felicia weakens, forecasters say the storm is still expected to pack drenching rains and strong winds when it starts hitting the Islands tomorrow.

"We're advising the whole island chain to be ready for very heavy rain," said Jim Weyman, director of the Central Pacific Hurricane Center. "Even if this system were to weaken, it would still be a very heavy rain producer."

The National Weather Service issued tropical storm and flash flood watches yesterday for the Big Island and Maui County, with meteorologists predicting the islands could get 10 to 12 inches of rain — more in some places — and winds of between 39 and 73 mph starting tomorrow afternoon.

O'ahu is expected to start seeing rain, winds and surf pick up starting tomorrow night, and the weather service said O'ahu, Kaua'i and Ni'ihau should prepare for the possibility of flooding through Wednesday.

Felicia entered the central Pacific (Hawai'i waters) yesterday morning.

At 11 p.m. yesterday, it was still a Category 1 hurricane, with winds near 80 mph.

It was about 855 miles east of Honolulu, moving west at about 15 mph.

"Felicia is taking its time to embark upon a serious weakening trend," the Central Pacific Hurricane Center said earlier yesterday.

The advisory said continued uncertainty on the strength of the storm over the next several days is due to a westerly shear that could affect Felicia, and sea-surface temperatures that will warm along the storm's expected track.

'JUST BE PREPARED'

From the air yesterday on the hurricane hunters' flight, Felicia didn't appear to have a clear structure. The trip through the hurricane was also mild, though punctuated with a few armchair-gripping bumps and periodic turbulence that required crew to put on their seatbelts.

Officials say that even though Felicia isn't a strong hurricane, that doesn't mean it won't pack a punch as a tropical storm.

"Just be prepared," said Delores Clark, a spokeswoman for the National Weather Service.

The storm — which at one point was a Category 4 hurricane churning in the eastern Pacific — has spurred a massive response from city, state and federal authorities, who started ramping up early last week.

This weekend, the city and state kept their emergency operations centers open to get updates and in case the storm hits early.

As the hurricane hunters took to the skies, gathering key data in hopes of improving the accuracy of the storm forecast, a 10-person team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived on O'ahu to lend assistance to local civil defense officials.

"We're just being proactive," said FEMA Region 9 spokeswoman Kim Walz.

The team also came to Hawai'i for Hurricane Flossie in 2007, and represents a "forward-leaning" policy adopted by FEMA after Hurricane Katrina, said Walz.

"We are getting in front of things quicker," she added.

Felicia is the second named storm of the hurricane season in the central Pacific.

And it was the strongest storm in the eastern Pacific since Hurricane Daniel in 2006.

FLYING THROUGH

The hurricane hunters' mission departed Hickam with eight crew members and a number of media representatives on board. The crew plowed their aircraft through the hurricane four times, each time dropping instrumentation in and near the center of the storm.

Along the way, the flight hit a few rough spots and the pilot spotted one part of the hurricane he called "nasty."

By 11:30 a.m., the crew was preparing to go through the storm a third time.

In the cockpit, Capt. Marc McAllister, the pilot, motioned to a radar image of Felicia, pointing out the storm's lack of structure. "When hurricanes hit cooler waters, they tend to dissipate," he said. "That's kind of what we're seeing here."

In its third pass-through of Felicia, the flight was immersed in white clouds and saw a few short bouts of turbulence.

At one point, a hula man bobblehead that McAllister bought in Waikiki and placed on the dashboard of the plane was swaying wildly. "I bought that in my hotel," McAllister said, laughing. He added, "It gets kind of stressful up here sometimes."

The plane stayed in the air for more than 12 hours — about half of which was spent getting to the storm and then back to the Islands. The team was scheduled to make a second flight into the hurricane last night, and two more today.

The hunters last came to the Islands for a hurricane in August 2007. That one, Hurricane Flossie, ended as a tropical storm that missed the Big Island by about 100 miles, but still brought high winds.

Some 75 hurricane hunters, members of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron from Biloxi, Miss., arrived in Hawai'i on Friday to fly through Felicia. The hunters fly C-130s — three of which made the journey to the Islands. On each mission, the reservists make multiple passes through the eye of the hurricane to collect data for the National Weather Service.

The reservists fly into hurricanes in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. They also gather data on major winter storms.

Crew members said they take pride in doing their part to provide a more accurate forecast. The information they gather improves hurricane forecasting accuracy by as much as 25 percent (as opposed to using satellites to measure the strength of a storm).

"It's probably one of the most rewarding jobs you could have," said McAllister, the C-130 pilot, "to get a little more of a notice to them (the public) and to be able to provide them with a little more information."