What It Is:Super Bowl rehearsal flyover in a U.S. Air Force F-16
Who Tried It:Jason Hahn, Human Interest and Sports Reporter
Level of Difficulty:9/10
There’s a moment as you’re on the verge of passing out when the borders of your vision start to smear, leaving only leaving a portion of what’s at the center in focus. Then, those smeared edges start to turn black.
Hours earlier, I spent the first hour of the day drinking glass after glass of water to make sure I was hydrated. It was something Air Force personnel stressed to me numerous times leading up to the big day, which was part of the Air Force’s flyover rehearsal forSuper Bowl 56. I also spent the first part of the morning worried about whether I was going to throw up during the flight, so all I ate was a banana.
My girlfriend Priscilla and I drove up to Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos, California just after 8:30 a.m., and soon after our arrival, I was fitted for a green-colored flight suit that would help prevent me from passing out while under the aircraft’s extreme acceleration.
The “G-suit,” as it’s called, contains air bladders around the sides and back of the legs that inflate when an aircraft begins to pull high G-forces. These bladders — think of the sleeve that fits around your arm while measuring blood pressure at the doctor’s office — squeeze the legs and push blood back to the heart and brain.
Jason Hahn
A sudden rush of blood from the brain can cause someone to lose consciousness. While the suit can help avert that from happening, it can’t do it all on its own.
That’s why for about 30 minutes, I practiced a breathing technique known as the “Hook Maneuver” with the help of an Air Force doctor. The technique involves taking short breaths while making the “K” sound, similar to the sound at the end of the word “hook.”
To keep me from passing out in the F-16, I’d do this every three seconds at top speeds while tensing the muscles in my neck, legs, arms and torso. This would allow me to exhale and inhale fast enough to keep blood flowing throughout my heart and chest.
After rehearsing the technique, and repeating the directions in my head a few other dozen times so I wouldn’t forget them, I met with Fiedler and another pilot to go over how to handle an emergency situation in the air.
Priscilla Smith
I’d love to say I remembered some of what was said, but I don’t and was told I wouldn’t. But Fiedler assured me that if anything were to happen in the air that would require an ejection, my parachute would deploy and I would land safely on the ground. That offered me some comfort, but when I was thousands of feet in the air just an hour later, the thought of being shot out of the F-16’s compact cockpit was terrifying.
After being fitted with a harness that wrapped around my shoulder and thighs, I walked out to the jet, shared a kiss with Priscilla (who also doubled as my camera-person for the day) and climbed a ladder into the rear of the aircraft.
Once inside, Fiedler climbed up and hooked my harness into the seat (the parachute is integrated into it). Between my legs was a yellow pull lever with the word “ejection,” a large joystick to my left, and what seemed like a thousand buttons I sure as hell wasn’t going to touch. One of them was labeled “dogfight.”
About 20 minutes later, Fiedler steered us into the runway, I switched on the GoPro installed in front of me, and we began to fly.
The first few seconds in the air felt slightly faster than a normal airplane takeoff until Fiedler pointed the nose of the F-16 straight into the sky and punched it. I may as well have been strapped to a rocket, and I was loving it.
Moments later we were upside down, with the ground appearing over my head and the sky underneath my feet. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
We straightened back out and started climbing even higher. That’s when I started getting that “roller-coaster” feeling, the one you get when you go down a steep drop on a ride. I hoped the banana from earlier wasn’t going to come back to haunt me.
I have no idea how many miles we traveled as we sped through the skies, but I felt it could have been thousands. Cities, mountains and deserts disappeared into the distance as quickly as they appeared.
While the flight had been going well, there was a technical difficulty that made me nervous. The only way Fiedler and I could communicate with each other was through a microphone and speaker in my helmet. Soon after takeoff, I noticed I could barely make out what she was saying over the roar of the aircraft.
I figured all I had to do was sit back and enjoy the ride anyway, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But I kept thinking back to Fiedler telling me that if anything were to go wrong, not to worry, she would tell me everything I needed to know. Now I couldn’t hear her, though she could hear me.
While we were soaring over a desert area, I heard Fiedler’s distant voice over the radio and concentrated as hard as I could to make out what she was saying.
“I can’t hear you, but I’m doing okay back here if that’s what you’re asking!” I shouted back.
I squeezed the sides of my helmet to see if it would help, but there was no improvement.
Then, for a brief moment, I heard Fiedler loud and clear: “Jason, I need you to listen very carefully…” and a chill went down my spine as I wondered what she would say next.
“I need you… turn the knob…” she said as I focused all my energy on listening to her every word.
From what I was able to understand, Fiedler wanted me to find a communications knob on my left side and turn it all the way up. Doing so switched our radios, and once I did, I heard clearer than any time up until that point, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
About 17 minutes into our flight, it was time to really put the F-16 to the test and hit 7 G’s of force.
Fiedler turned the F-16 on its side and blasted off. I immediately felt the skin of my face pull back and my body press into the seat, then press some more. This was the moment when the blurred blackness began to appear.
Fortunately, I was able to stay awake thanks to the “Hook Maneuver,” and less than 10 seconds later, we slowed down. I was ready for more.
A minute later, the F-16 was back on its side, and we were hitting nine times the force of gravity, the maximum amount the aircraft can withstand. At this speed, it was hard to keep my eyelids from forcibly slamming shut. Because I knew what to expect, the blurs and the blacks didn’t appear that time around.
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After doing a few more tricks, we headed back to base, and I started battling nausea that Air Force personnel later told me was normal once the adrenaline from the ride began to subside.
Once we landed, Fiedler and I gave each other a high-five and a hug, and she told me I was one of the most fun passengers she had thanks to my constant yelling (she admitted she had to turn down my volume at one point).
After dressing back into my civilian clothes, I walked back to the car with Priscilla and sat in the driver’s seat for a few minutes soaking in what I had just experienced.
In my bag with me were two patches the Air Force let me take home — one for the Viper Demo Team, plus a special Air Force patch featuring the Super Bowl 56 logo. Two days later, I’d watch my Los Angeles Rams win the game, and cap off an epic weekend that will be one for the books.
The Verdict:While I’d rate the overall difficulty of the experience an 9/10, I would 10/10 do it again.
source: people.com
