F-16 incentive ride

[Signal Witch]

What I learned on an F-16 incentive ride



Some years ago, while I was doing project work at Luke AFB, I got offered a back-seat ride in an F-16. I've been around pilot’s enough to know their mission is simple. Make the contractor nap at six Gs or decorate the inside of a government helmet. FYI: Pilots do not clean helmets. Life support does. After a little nudging, I said yes.
 
Life support fitted me with the basics. CSU-13 G-suit, HGU-55 helmet, MBU-20 mask, COMBAT EDGE vest. Mask hose into the CRU-94 on my harness. G-suit hose into the jet’s anti-G port. Quick comms check, oxygen flow check, and a short pressure-breathing test so I knew what the vest and airflow would feel like under G.
 
The cockpit briefing was short and serious. The ejection seat is an ACES II. Handle between the knees. Elbows in. Head back. Chin down. Pull if told or if the pilot is incapacitated. If you pull it under 2k ft you're probably toast.
 
On the ramp the crew chief strapped me in tight. Seat pins came out only when everything was set. Canopy down. Taxi to end of runway. EOR team did the last-chance check and pulled required ground pins, including the EPU pin.
 
Cleared for takeoff. He set military power and released the brakes. The shove hit right away. We rotated near 150 knots, gear up, flaps handled themselves. I kept my head back and breathing steady as we pitched up hard, climbed a few thousand feet in under a minute.

On the way to the training airspace I could see the White Tank Mountains, West Valley neighborhoods, farm blocks, and dry washes. Out over the Barry M. Goldwater Range it was ridgelines, saguaro flats, dry lakebeds, target circles, and range roads. We saw other air traffic working their blocks and we stayed away from them.

We did a simple G warmup. Four Gs, then a little higher. Pressure breathing kicked in. I used the straining maneuver they teach you. It is work. No carnival flying. No low-level hot dogging. For the numbers people, we topped around 22,000 feet and a hair under Mach 0.9. No supersonic on guest rides :( 
 
We lined up straight on final. The pilot aimed for the big white blocks a thousand feet down the runway. In an F-16 you don’t flare much. You hold the view, pull the power back, and let the main wheels touch. We landed around 150 knots or roughly 170 mph. He kept the nose up to let the jet slow itself so we didn’t cook the brakes. Around 90 to 100 knots he lowered the nose, the speed brakes were already out, and he used light braking to take the fast exit taxiway.

We taxied in. Shut it down. Pins went back in. All hoses came off.
 
In  case you were wondering...
I didn't pass out! 
I didn't blow my lunch into a lt colonel's helmet! 
But I did walk away with more respect for the process and the people who run it. For them it was a routine sortie.
For me it was a twice in a lifetime moment to be treasured always...

[Sky727]

Your " G " tolerance increases with practice IMO. When I first stared 4 to 4.5 Gs and I would start to get tunnel vision or gray out. After a few months practice without a G suit and only using proper tightening and breathing 4 or 5 Gs no longer bothered me other than being tired after an hours airshow routine practice. 

Great story and thanks. I have taken airlines pilots up with several thousand hours who could not handle gentile acrobatics without getting sick so you did well. Riding instead of doing is harder to stay well and conscience IMO. 

[Zaphod58]

Too bad it wasn’t more recent or you could have had pictures of your ride. That sounds like a blast though!

[Tecate]

Good on you all!! Not my thing, I always wanted to try it but I get a bit wonky just riding in the back seat!!

It really sounds like an extremely exciting experience though!

Motorcycles and working a patient in the back of a moving ambulance are about the my limits!!

I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was younger but was told my vision was not up to snuff, damn!

Tecate

[Blackfingers]

What an experience :)

[EXETER]

What I learned on an F-16 incentive ride

[Image: https://denyignorance.com/uploader/images/luke.jpg]

Some years ago, while I was doing project work at Luke AFB, I got offered a back-seat ride in an F-16. I've been around pilot’s enough to know their mission is simple. Make the contractor nap at six Gs or decorate the inside of a government helmet. FYI: Pilots do not clean helmets. Life support does. After a little nudging, I said yes.
 
Life support fitted me with the basics. CSU-13 G-suit, HGU-55 helmet, MBU-20 mask, COMBAT EDGE vest. Mask hose into the CRU-94 on my harness. G-suit hose into the jet’s anti-G port. Quick comms check, oxygen flow check, and a short pressure-breathing test so I knew what the vest and airflow would feel like under G.
 
The cockpit briefing was short and serious. The ejection seat is an ACES II. Handle between the knees. Elbows in. Head back. Chin down. Pull if told or if the pilot is incapacitated. If you pull it under 2k ft you're probably toast.
 
On the ramp the crew chief strapped me in tight. Seat pins came out only when everything was set. Canopy down. Taxi to end of runway. EOR team did the last-chance check and pulled required ground pins, including the EPU pin.
 
Cleared for takeoff. He set military power and released the brakes. The shove hit right away. We rotated near 150 knots, gear up, flaps handled themselves. I kept my head back and breathing steady as we pitched up hard, climbed a few thousand feet in under a minute.

On the way to the training airspace I could see the White Tank Mountains, West Valley neighborhoods, farm blocks, and dry washes. Out over the Barry M. Goldwater Range it was ridgelines, saguaro flats, dry lakebeds, target circles, and range roads. We saw other air traffic working their blocks and we stayed away from them.

We did a simple G warmup. Four Gs, then a little higher. Pressure breathing kicked in. I used the straining maneuver they teach you. It is work. No carnival flying. No low-level hot dogging. For the numbers people, we topped around 22,000 feet and a hair under Mach 0.9. No supersonic on guest rides :( 
 
We lined up straight on final. The pilot aimed for the big white blocks a thousand feet down the runway. In an F-16 you don’t flare much. You hold the view, pull the power back, and let the main wheels touch. We landed around 150 knots or roughly 170 mph. He kept the nose up to let the jet slow itself so we didn’t cook the brakes. Around 90 to 100 knots he lowered the nose, the speed brakes were already out, and he used light braking to take the fast exit taxiway.

We taxied in. Shut it down. Pins went back in. All hoses came off.
 
In  case you were wondering...
I didn't pass out! 
I didn't blow my lunch into a lt colonel's helmet! 
But I did walk away with more respect for the process and the people who run it. For them it was a routine sortie.
For me it was a twice in a lifetime moment to be treasured always...

Definitely one of the benefits of working around certain government installations where they have all the cool toys!

Since we're telling war stories.....I had a somewhat similar experience like this once when I was still working for NASA.  As an aerospace engineer, I had worked on almost all of NASA's moon-Mars human exploration mission studies from 1988 to 2000.  I was also an active private pilot at the time.  For reasons that I still don't understand to this day someone who worked at the Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS) called me up out of the blue and asked me if I would like to fly some simulated Space Shuttle landings.  For those who don't know, the VMS is the largest motion based flight simulator in the world, and is a national facility that the Astronauts used in training for Shuttle missions.  

This is like that fantasy that private pilots sometimes have where we're a passenger in a 747 over the Atlantic and the pilot and copilot both have heart attacks, so the flight attendant comes back into the cabin and asks if there are any pilots on board who can land the plane, so you boldly raise your hand and go onto the flight deck, take over the controls and save everyone on board.

So of course I said yes in my best Chuck Yeager West Virginia drawl and showed up at the door of the VMS within 30 minutes.  

I strapped in to the simulated Shuttle cockpit and put on a David Clark pilot's headset. They gave me a 5 minute briefing on what to do and not do, told me to take the stick, left the cabin, and shut the door.  Piece of cake, I thought.  

And actually, the first simulation was a piece of cake, because they chose the easiest problem first.  The video screens suddenly came alive and I found myself in broad daylight over the desert about 5 miles northeast of the town of Boron, CA, on final approach to runway 22 at Edwards, flying at about 195 kts, and at what I thought was a ridiculously high altitude.  The first thing to keep in mind about the Shuttle, is that it was a glider. That's good news and bad news. The good news is that you don't have any engine management tasks to distract you. The bad news is that you don't have any engine power to save you if you get too low and too slow.  So you get exactly one chance to land. The second thing to keep in mind about the Shuttle, is that its glide slope on final is about 20 degrees.  That's compared to 3 degrees for a light aircraft making a powered landing, so about 7 times steeper.  When you're on the correct glide slope in the Shuttle, it looks like you are making a Kamikaze dive attack on the runway. But the good news about that is that it is ridiculously easy to aim for the right touchdown point on the runway maintaining a constant pitch attitude. So I arrived over the approach end of the runway at the right airspeed and pitch angle, and when the radar altimeter showed about 50 feet, I pulled back on the stick, slowed the descent rate to something reasonable and soon felt the main gear touch down almost simultaneously. In the Shuttle, a soon as you touchdown, you deploy the rudder speed brakes to slow down and bring the nose wheel down onto the runway.  As soon as the nose wheel touches down, you pop the drag chute, since that does most of the deceleration.  It was a textbook landing.  Piece of cake.

The Shuttle almost always landed at either Edwards AFB in California or Kennedy Space Center in Florida because that's where the support facilities were, but there are a couple of dozen divert runways all over the world where the Shuttle could have landed in an emergency.  Cherry Point MCAS ( Marine Corps Air Station), NC was one of those emergency divert runways and was about 60% of the length of the one at Edwards.  No Shuttle had ever landed there, but the Astronauts had to train for it, just in case.

So the VMS operators said,"OK, this time we're going to do Cherry Point."  The next thing I knew I found myself at night, over a solid cloud deck, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, headed downhill at 195 kts and presumably pointed at the approach end of 23R, flying on instruments. At an altitude I assumed was within VFR minimums we popped down below the cloud deck and the runway lights were in sight.  I proceeded as before except that in the darkness, depth perception was almost non-existent, and I began the landing flare too early. We floated about 500 feet further down the runway than we should have and landed hard with too high a sink rate. I popped the drag chute as soon as possible and immediately realized that we were going too fast on a runway that was too short. So I stood on the brakes, which quickly overheated and burst into simulated flames. We rolled off the end of the runway still going about 50 kts, with panel lights flashing red and buzzers going off and the simulation abruptly stopping.  A total write-off.  I later realized that that particular simulation was approximately equivalent to attempting a night carrier landing with no possibility of a go-around.

Just when I thought I'd had enough fun for one day they said, "We've got the Apollo lunar lander simulation spooled up, would you like to try landing on the moon?"  There's only one possible answer to that question of course, so I soon found myself getting the 5-minute briefing on which control stick did what, and what I had to do to recreate the fight path that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took in their famous mission. 

Then, a minute later, I found myself about 20 km above the simulated lunar surface scooting along at about 2.5 km/sec on a slowly descending arc. At the designated time and altitude, I applied the designated amount of braking thrust and turned the trajectory from almost horizontal to vertical and got down to the designated descent rate at just the right altitude.  We touched down reasonably softly and cut off the engines with fuel to spare. I did it all by flying the instruments. Basically no visual references. Piece of cake.

Then they said, "OK this time we're going to simulate Neil Armstrong's actual Apollo 11 trajectory."  In the actual mission, Neil and Buzz got down to about 600 ft above the surface and Neil saw that the spot they were targeting  was in a boulder field, and he decided to extend the trajectory to a safer location. So he took over manually and flew the lander to a clear spot another couple of miles or so down range and landed with a few seconds of fuel remaining.  

Once again, I flew on instruments to the decision point and pretended to be Neil Armstrong. And once again, depth perception was lousy.  I discovered that when I commanded an attitude adjustment of one kind or another I would usually overshoot and have to correct it back in the other direction, which would cause an error somewhere else in the trajectory, etc., etc.  The landing immediately went to crap as soon as I tried to navigate visually.  I tried it several times, and always ran out of fuel hundreds of feet above the surface and in the wrong location.  

When it was over, I went back to my cubicle and resumed making view-graphs.  And--like you--I had developed an immense about of respect for the professionals and the process.