Flying With The Blue Angels

Today I got an email from my friend Wayne.

The main part of the email said:

Date: Thursday, October 1, 2009, 2:32 PM

This video is way too cool! Got to watch this guy keep passing out during the flight.

>
> Yikes.....what a ride.
>
> > Ride in an F/A 18 Hornet
> > Make sure and click on all 5 excerpts. What a Ride!
> > Make sure your sound is on.
> > This is very good. Be sure to watch all of the
> > 'scenes' especially 'Scene 2'.
> > You have to click on each photo at the left to watch the
> > scene.
> > Click on the link below - there are 5 videos to watch!!
> > http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/ajc/swf/blueangels/blueangels.swf

If you have about ten minutes, you should watch those video clips. Really cool!

Wayne appended a question to me onto this email: "I thought you would like this. What causes them to pass out ??"

So I wrote the following back to Wayne. I thought anyone reading here might enjoy reading this, too.

*************************************************

Hi, Wayne –

This is a great set of clips. Even if it was a Navy plane, not an AF one. GRIN!

You can’t imagine the rush you get from your first takeoff in an afterburner-powered jet. A roller coaster is the closest thing mere mortals experience, but even the most extreme roller coaster doesn’t come close. And the flying! Imagine being at about 18,000 feet, headed straight down at the ground, doing 400 knots. Then you have to pull multiple G’s to come back to level flight.

Comments on the clips:

In the first one, did you notice they took off in the rain? The reporter was chewing gum. NOT a good idea. Choking hazard.

Clip 2: Passing out on the Immelman – Ha ha ha! The pilot says “this happens frequently on the Immelman…” Not really. You heard the guy (probably the pilot) grunting at first. It probably wasn’t the reporter, because he passed out. Or else he did it wrong. What happens is when you pull back hard on the stick, you’re pressed into the seat with several multiples of the force of gravity, called “G’s.” Twice the force of gravity (which you can get in a small airplane, in a 60° bank level turn) means you weigh twice as much as normal, and we call that “two G’s.” When you pull up for an Immelman, which is a maneuver in which you pull the nose all the way up through vertical and keep pulling until you’re upside down, then roll wings level, when you pull up in that maneuver in an F/A-18, you probably pull FOUR G’s.

People can usually endure two G’s without training or special actions, but when you get to three G’s or more, the blood is pulled down out of your head (your heart and blood pressure isn’t strong enough to pump it up that 4G hill), and first you lose your vision (black out) because the eyes need constant oxygen to function, and if it goes on a bit longer, you lose consciousness (pass out). The grunting you heard was performing an action called the M-1 maneuver, in which you tense all the muscles in your legs and belly, then hold your breath and push (grunt), which squeezes your blood out of those areas and back to your head, so you can maintain your vision and your consciousness. If someone pulls up on the 4G Immelman and does not perform the M-1 maneuver (or does it wrongly), he or she will probably black out, and maybe pass out. That should answer your question about why this guy passed out.

The reporter explains a bit of this, but not very well, in Clip 3. Also in clip 3, he says they pull 7½ Gs! WOW! Only a combat aircraft (or a well-built trainer) can do this, and if someone hasn’t had actual live training, not just a briefing before the flight, they will definitely black out and probably pass out during this turn. The steeper a turn is, the more G’s you have to pull to stay level. It looks like this turn is about an 80° bank (VERY steep).

The reporter also says the pilot doesn’t pass out because he’s had flight school and advanced flight school while all the reporter had was 15 minutes of training – HA HA HA! I’d bet you a hundred bucks that the pilot was also wearing a G-suit, which is like an external girdle made of air bladders that connects to the compressor bleed (pressurized air from the engine) that when the plane pulls G’s it fills up those bladders and helps squeeze the blood from the legs and abdomen.

Clip 4: Obviously his ginger-flavored gum wasn’t as effective as he’d hoped.

Needless to say, there’s a LOT to do while you’re up performing these maneuvers. The two most critical things, of course, are your airspeed (if you don’t go fast enough, you fall out of the sky) and your attitude (if your airplane is pointing in the wrong direction, it won’t go where you want it to), but you also have to watch your altitude (don’t get too close to the ground), your angle of attack, your fuel status, your engine performance, all the while listening to the air traffic controller (lots of this on clip 1), watching for other airplanes (clip 3, he was clearing the turn), being careful of your position over the ground (clip 4 he had to “clear those houses”), navigation (don’t want to get lost!), and maybe talk to whoever else is in the plane with you. Once you have a good handle on all this, then you can begin to worry about the aerobatic maneuvers, such as your starting ground position, altitude, and airspeed for going into the Immelman, and how to pull exactly the right number of G’s so you can wind up on the top at exactly the right altitude and airspeed… Now imagine doing all this while at the same time flying at 500 knots in formation with another airplane only three feet away.

Talk about exciting. That’s it.

Have a great Saturday! Take care,

David