Why is there almost no wind at the eye of a hurricane?

Because the air is not going through the middle - it spirals inward, and as it converges it speeds up and is flung around the centre rather than into it, in the same way a skater's spin tightens. A ring of the fastest winds in the storm forms around a core that the air never reaches.

In the eye, air is instead sinking slowly from above, which warms and dries it and clears the cloud. So the centre of the most violent weather system on the planet is calm, warm and often sunny, with a wall of cloud rising 15 kilometres on every side. Birds get trapped in there and are carried hundreds of miles.

It is dangerous precisely because it is pleasant. People go outside during the eye, and the far eyewall arrives perhaps half an hour later with winds from the opposite direction, hitting structures already weakened from the other side. Forecasters also watch for eyewall replacement, where a new ring forms outside the old one - the storm briefly weakens and then often comes back broader and stronger.