There are some places that feel very safe. Like your bed. Or a corner booth at your favorite diner. Or Mom's kitchen table. There are some places that feel very unsafe. Like in a commercial airliner in the middle of one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded.

But that's where 173 Delta passengers, plus flight crew, found themselves Wednesday afternoon. Delta Flight 302, the last commercial airplane to fly out of San Juan before the airport shut down amid 185 mile-per-hour winds, rocketed out of Puerto Rico's San Juan Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in between bands of Category 5 Hurricane Irma. The flight safely made it to New York's JFK International Airport less than three and half hours later.

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Sounds terrifying, but according to flying experts, it’s NBD. Sure, there are a few tricks to piloting a Boeing 737-900ER around a devastating hurricane, “but it’s not that much different from flying through the Midwest in the summertime with thunderstorms,” says Douglas M. Moss, a commercial pilot and aviation consultant with AeroPacific Consulting. “It’s the same techniques, the same tools, the same procedures you use for avoiding thunderstorms.”

In fact, the real daredevil work happened before takeoff—and even before the plane landed in San Juan. As the Delta flight chugged toward Puerto Rico for its scheduled landing at 12:08 pm, Delta’s meteorology team and the folks at its sophisticated command center opted not to turn back to a safer clime—Miami, perhaps?—and decided to steer toward the storm.

“They took a hard look at the weather data and the track of the storm and worked with the flight crew and dispatcher to agree it was safe to operate the flight," Erik Snell, who oversees Delta's operations and command center, said in a statement. (Delta notes the wind gusts in the area were up to 31 knots, "well below operating limits for the 737-900ER.")

Once the plane landed in San Juan, the alternative—leaving the plane on the tarmac or in a hangar—would probably have destroyed the airplane. “It’s awful hard to keep an airplane that big down to the ground permanently, so it doesn’t move and doesn’t move into other airplanes or into the terminal,” says Pete Field, a former Navy test pilot. “Even a Boeing 737 could be wrenched around.” If the plane had gotten stuck, Delta probably could have gotten the humans out safely. But it almost certainly would have lost a plane.