A fluid dynamics professor at the University of Akron, OH, says he’s come up with an innovative way to defuse the fury or hurricanes before they can make landfall, causing widespread death and destruction.

Hurricane damages average over (US)$5 billion a year in the U.S.

It’s simple, really… Send supersonic fighter jets into the eye of the beast and use their sonic booms to literally knock the wind out of the storm.

Dr. Arkady Leonov says sonic booms could disrupt or counter hurricane winds and flying the jets close to the water, under a storm, could help starve the storm of the warm air it sucks in to fuel itself.

But other experts are unconvinced.

Hugh Willoughby, a hurricane researcher at Florida International University, says the sonic booms would probably have little effect on a hurricane, passing through the storm ‘like wind through a tennis racket’.

Willoghby also wonders whether the aircraft could structurally withstand the 1,000 mph / 1,600 kph plunge through the hurricane’s eye wall. .

So far, Leonov’s idea is just that — an intriguing idea. No word, yet, whether anyone with some spare supersonic jets as stepped forward to sponsor a practical test.