Passenger In Fighter Jet - Somewhere up in New Jersey, I took the oxygen mask off my face, worried I was going to pass out.
Maj. Jason Markzon, the pilot of our F-16 fighter jet, recently piloted the plane through two tight, difficult turns, part of an aviation procedure called a G-drill. A moment later, Markzon — whose Air Force call sign is Flack — suddenly flipped the plane onto its side, a maneuver known as a jackknife maneuver that places the plane's wings perpendicular to the ground. He brought us back to horizontal, then pulled the plane to the right. he sighed.
Passenger In Fighter Jet
The crushing turns and high-speed maneuvers are physically punishing—a roller coaster ride I want to finish. "Do you want to level up?" I asked.
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"Rob, how are you, man?" Flack asked, his voice coming from the speakers on my red, white and blue helmet.
We took off about 20 minutes later, all eight afterburner stages ignited and we were rocketed onto the runway at MacArthur Airport on Long Island. We screamed off the ground and into a partly cloudy blue sky on a windy morning in late May. Moments after becoming airborne, Flack pulled back on the control stick with his right hand, sending us into a 60-degree climb at a speed north of 400 mph.
The seats on an F-16 are reclined at a 30-degree angle, so a 60-degree climb looks like you're going straight up. We flew at about 10,000 feet. It took all of about 30 seconds and we hit 5.4 Gs, or more than five times the force of gravity. I weighed about 155 pounds, but at that speed, I felt like I weighed more than 800. Flack finished the climb by flattening us with a gentle spin. For a moment we turned.
We sailed into the Garden State and Flack made a 90 degree turn, then a brutal 180 degree turn - a long hard pull and a steep bank angle. I experienced 6.2 Gs during the maneuver. (Astronauts typically endure three or four during takeoff, and an F-16 and its pilot can endure nine.) The sudden movement is part of our G exercise, a standard practice on the left, but any flight that could hit the crew with high Gs to ensure. that the plane, and everyone on board, can handle the stress. I didn't pass.
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It's hard to describe the terrible feeling of pulling heavy Gs. An overwhelming feeling pushed you back to your seat. You have difficulty breathing. The force pushes blood away from your eyes and brain, potentially giving you tunnel vision. It's not uncommon for beginners to feel beaten up by the Gs—some even passed out—and shaken to the point of vomiting from airsickness.
The Air Force sometimes offers journalists the opportunity to ride in an F-16 when the Thunderbird is in town. The team, which is to the Air Force what the Blue Angels, with their F/A-18 jets, are to the Navy, was held in New York last May.
Pilots often refer to the F-16 as "the snake," a reference to the spaceship that appeared in the original Battlestar Galactica and the fact that the aircraft is so maneuverable that it seems to vibrate like a snake's head. snake (Official name is "Fighting Falcon", but come on: "viper" sounds cooler.)
Flack took me to an F-16D Block 52, a two-seater built in the early 1990s. It has a Pratt & Whitney F100 turbofan engine that produces more than 29,000 pounds of thrust in the afterburner. Keep the throttles open and, if you've burned enough fuel to lighten the load, the plane will fly straight. I was sitting in the Aces 2 ejection seat, which I had set before I got up by moving a small lever.
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The Air Force added the F-16 to its fleet in 1979, and the aircraft remains in service today; the sleek single-engine jet is lighter than navy fighters and can hit twice the speed of sound. It is known for its agility and ability to accelerate quickly from low speed. "The F-16 was the premier dogfighting aircraft of the late 20th century," said retired Col. Mike Torrealday (call sign, T-Day), who flew the plane for about 25 years. even got out of one over Utah behind the engine. failure. "It's probably one of the most physically powerful airplanes ever flown."
Movies like Top Gun can't convey the brutal physics of flying a fighter jet that can, as T-Day put it, "take 9 Gs in less than a second." Pilots are athletes in peak physical condition and undergo years of training to withstand extreme forces. This is very important to avoid a phenomenon called G-LOC (pronounced gee-lock), or G-induced loss of consciousness.
Before we strapped on the snake, Flack and I donned G-suits—a high-waisted garment worn over a flight suit with a hose connected to an aerial air system. As the pilots experience increasing acceleration, the suit fills with air like a blood pressure cuff, squeezing the legs and stomach. This prevents blood pooling in the limbs, keeping it in the chest and head and reducing the risk of losing consciousness.
More important than the equipment is an exercise called the anti-G-strain maneuver, which involves straining the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and hamstrings while engaging your abs. Imagine sitting in an office chair, pulling your legs back as you twist and pull forward. It helps keep blood flowing to your core and brain, keeps your lights on, and keeps you, as pilots say, from falling asleep. Aviators do this by inhaling and exhaling rapidly every three seconds or so making a breathy "keh" sound.
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Fighter pilots learn these techniques early in training planes and hone them in a centrifuge, learning what it takes to get them right — and wrong. "You can see someone almost melt down in front of you if they don't do the right anti-G-strain maneuver," says Cheryl Lowry, a retired Air Force colonel and teaching physician at the University of Texas Medical Center. Branch.
You can't safely pull that much G without wearing the suit and doing the training. Your heart rate increases as you fight to keep the blood flowing up instead of pooling everywhere. You lose your peripheral vision and then the ability to see color before going temporarily blind. "Well right after that, you're in danger of having a G-LOC," Lowry said. When you regain consciousness - unless the plane has crashed - you will feel faint.
Pilots rarely lose consciousness; The Air Force says that statistically, it takes 200,000 hours of flight time or more to earn a G-LOC activity. It has recorded at least nine incidents in each of the past three years, including a fatality during a Thunderbirds practice in Nevada in April 2018. May. Stephen Del Bagno crashed after feeling a maximum of 2 negative Gs (a situation that occurs when the aircraft flips, sending blood to the head), while flying upside down before going into an 8.5g dive. The Air Force determined that the "push-pull" effect of these two extremes impaired Del Bagno's force tolerance and reduced the effectiveness of his anti-force maneuver, leading to G-LOC.
Computer code can help. The F-16 and some F-35 fighter jets use software called Auto-GCAS to avoid a crash if a pilot loses consciousness. The Air Force says the system saved eight lives. But Thunderbird eschews the technology because its pilots often fly at low altitudes and in tight formations and don't want to compromise the software that controls the planes.
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Military pilots spend years mastering the skills necessary to handle the rigors of high-speed flight. I had about four hours of training which included the basics of what to do during an extraction. (A tip: "think wet and cross" when heading toward power lines.)
Nailing the G strain is "like hitting the right golf swing," says Jan Stepanek, a physician and chair of the Aviation Medicine Program at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. Experienced aviators like Flack rely on muscle memory to pull it off, knowing how many G's they can handle before it's needed and can do it almost unconsciously. I'm not sure I'm doing it right.
Flack had another advantage over me: Since he was in control of the plane, he knew what was coming. Motion sickness in a fighter jet, like virtual reality and even the back seat of a car, is caused by a disconnect between what your eyes see, what your ears feel, and how your brain processes it. that dissonance. Although I enjoyed a clear view of the sky and land below (but not in front of me, as Flack's chair and other equipment obstructed the view) through the canopy, the stimuli I felt in my inner ear were too much.
I found it exciting to be on the plane - for someone who loves aviation, it was one of the worst and most stressful times of my life. But the violence of it all grew.
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