How I Went Níne Gs in
an F-16 and Only
Threw Up Five Times

“Can you have it ready by Monday morning?” is a hard question. “Would you like to fly with the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds?” is not. I gave my answer (you bet), and went on with life, not daring to hope that my intermediaries, an aviation buff and a retired three-star U.S. Air Force general, would be able to deliver. Slowly the request worked its way through the Air Force channels, from Thunderbirds headquarters at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, to the one-star general of the 57th Wing, then to the two-star commander of the Air Weapons and Tactics Center at Nellis; then to the two-star general for Operations at headquarters of the Air Combat Command at Langley AFB in Virginia, and finally all the way up to his four-star commander. It’s not all that routine to go for a ride in a $30 million fighter plane, when those planes are more profitably employed teaching real macho to Cessna-shooting Cuban MiGs or strafing people named Ratko. But the answer was yes, and so I found myself in the midst of the second improbability, Las Vegas on Ash Wednesday. “There isn’t a free room in town,” said the front desk clerk at Caesars Palace. So much for America’s spiritual well-being, circa 1996.

I had dinner the night before the flight with my intermediary, Lt. Gen. Robert Beckel (Ret.), at a restaurant that looks down on a lagoon in which two full-size pirate ships attack each other every hour. In a distinguished career, General Beckel flew 313 combat missions in Vietnam, including close air support during the siege of Khe Sanh. He also flew the U-2 and SR-71 “Blackbird” reconnaissance planes, the latter so fast (Mach 3, 1,800 mph) that, as he put it in terms even a math imbecile like myself could understand, “If you fired a .30-06 rifle from Los Angeles and took off simultaneously in the SR-71, the SR-71 would get to New York five minutes before the bullet.” Later, as head of the 15th Air Force, he commanded the B-52 bombers that gave permanent nervous tics to the Iraqi Republican Guard during Desert Storm.

For two years in the mid-1960s, General Beckel flew the solo position with the Thunderbirds. He has the gentle manner that I’ve found in all but one of the numerous war heroes I’ve met. “If it’s possible for one man to love another man,” he tells me of the Thunderbirds, “this would be it.” I don’t think he’s spent much time in New York or San Francisco, but I got his drift. The Thunderbirds, eights pilots and 130-odd enlisted men and women, are a tightly knit group.

He told a story about the time actress Yvette Mimieux—remember her? the girl Rod Taylor rescues from the Eloi in The Time Machine—went up for an “orientation ride” with the Thunderbirds in the mid-sixties. Normally, the Thunderbird’s narrator is the one who takes visitors up for rides, but in this case the leader asserted droit du seigneur and took her up himself. A few days later the Air Force chief of staff opened the newspaper to an article featuring the very lovely Miss Mimieux in the cockpit of one of his planes, alongside the headline, OPERATION BEDSIDE. The story was full of breathless quotes about how she’d gone three times the speed of sound upside down, five feet above the ground. “Which of course she hadn’t,” said General Beckel. “And OPERATION BEDSIDE was the name of the program she’d taken part in, and for which this was the reward—visiting servicemen in the hospital. So that ended orientation trips for a while.”

He talked about G forces, the phenomenon that was going to be a big part of my day tomorrow. G forces are multiples of the force of gravity. Standing, walking or sitting normally, we are under one G. We experience two to three Gs in the seat of a 747 during takeoff. Tomorrow, in the F-16, I would be “pulling” up to nine Gs. My 185 pounds would, if put on a scale during the maneuver, weigh 1,665 pounds. Nine Gs is the normal operating limit of an F-16.

Nine Gs is also the point where your average civilian—such as myself—starts to black out. Astronauts on take-off go through up to twenty-five Gs, but they are lying on their backs. An F-16 pilot is reclining slightly and, if he is pulling nine Gs, is usually in the middle of a dogfight, or trying to shake a heat-seeking missile.

Flying the plane itself, said the general, isn’t really all that hard. In the old days, getting the aircraft to do what you wanted it to do was a big part of the whole job. These days, computers do most of that work, leaving the pilot to concentrate on up to 125 possible configurations of guns, missiles and bombs. The stick, which used to be between the legs, is now off to the right, leaving the left hand to operate the weaponry. The stick itself barely moves—a mere eighth of an inch in any direction. Pressure sensors register the slightest touch. In fact, the first modern sticks didn’t move at all, until the pilots demanded that a little play be built into them, for feel.

“Now we have what’s called ‘instantaneous Gs,’ ” said the general. The slightest pressure on that stick and the pilot can find himself pulling the maximum nine Gs and fighting not only the enemy but also from draining the blood in his brain. Pilots wear a G suit, outer leggings resembling chaps that contain air bladders that inflate automatically under G pressure, squeezing the legs and midsection and forcing blood to stay in the upper body. But G suits can’t do all the work, and if you are not prepared for high Gs, you can black out in only three seconds. It takes anywhere from seventeen to forty-five seconds to fully regain consciousness; that’s a long time if your nose is pointing to the ground at six hundred miles per hour. It happened recently to an American pilot in the Adriatic.

I remember two other things from that night: General Beckel pointing out that the Thunderbirds were formed in 1953 to convince Americans that jet fighters were really safe, despite the fact that so many of them were crashing in the Korean War; and riding up to my room in the elevator in Caesars Palace with a Roman centurion.

Nellis Air Force Base is a fifteen-minute drive north of Las Vegas. There are no centurions in its elevators, but it is headquarters to the Air Warfare Center, which runs the Red Flag exercises that simulate aerial combat between aggressors and defenders. They keep MiGs and other Soviet planes acquired (one way or another) here. This is where many of the top combat pilots in the Air Force come to train. It’s also home to the U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron, known more generally as the Thunderbirds. It’s a crisp desert day punctuated by the sound of screaming turbofan engines.

You do not just show up and immediately go whooshing up into the wild blue yonder in your F-16, white scarf whipping from your neck. First you report to a flight surgeon, in my case, Capt. Jack “Harpo” Shelton, who checks your vitals and looks in your ears to make sure that you can do the Valsalva maneuver (holding your nose and blowing to vent inner-ear pressure). The flight surgeon tells you, from personal experience, that riding in the backseat of an F-16 can be a “nauseogenic experience,” but that there are ways to compensate. (1) Don’t look down into the cockpit, (2) find the horizon and keep looking at it, (3) increase oxygen flow through the mask to 100 percent. Most people, he said, tend to get sick after the acrobatics because it’s then that the adrenaline stops pumping, so—“try to keep excited.” He reassures me that “less than half the people who go up for rides throw up. I ask him if I can take the herbal antimotion-sickness tablet that I’ve brought with me. (I’d been told not to use patches or traditional drugs as these would only “diminish the experience.”) Fine, he says, can’t hurt.

Next comes the lecture about compensating for G forces. “It’s an interesting sensation the first time you feel it.” I’ll know, he says, if the blood is draining from my head when I start to lose peripheral vision. “It will eventually narrow down to where it looks like you’re staring out through the opening in a straw.” I sense that this could be a real disadvantage in a dogfight.

The solution, according to the Air Force handout he hands me, is “straining like you’re having a hard bowel movement.” Ah, the romance of the wild blue yonder.… It occurs to me that a hard bowel movement would probably come very easily to me in the event I saw a surface-to-air missile in my rearview mirror. Anyway, the idea is to tighten every muscle below the waist so as to give blood draining from the upper body nowhere to go. Also, Captain Shelton advises, fill your lungs to three-quarters, hold your breath for three to four seconds, then very quickly inhale and exhale in a sort of bizarre parody of Lamaze birth classes. What this does is to constrict the muscles and heart, thereby forcing the blood to stay in the brain. Keep that brain full of blood, was the message I took away from flight surgery.

I practice all this in the car on the way back to the Thunderbird hangar with my escort, SSgt. Chuck Ramey. Constricting my buns and breathing like a porpoise, in combination with an impending sense of dread, gave me some insight into what it might be like to drive to the delivery room in labor. Leave it to a nineties male to discern similarities between childbirth and flying in a fighter jet.

I was now turned over to a Life Support Specialist. I rejoiced in his title, and soon in SSgt. Jeff Kessler himself, to whom it falls to dress visiting backseaters in flight suit, G suit, explain how to use the parachute and survival harness, helmet, oxygen mask, and generally to condense three days of safety briefings into one hour.

This can have unintentionally comic effect, as it did when, during the “Post Ejection Procedures” portion of Sergeant Kessler’s briefing, he described how I must angle myself when falling between high-voltage power lines (feet together, head to one side; and may you never have to use this information) and how I should then “be relaxed” for the landing. “Be relaxed” was item number 42 or thereabouts on my post-ejection agenda, starting with being blasted out of the cockpit while going hundreds of miles an hour, possibly upside down. All the makings of a bad air day. In my youth I once jumped from a plane, and so I know from experience how wretched a prospect it is, even when done for obscure recreational reasons.

I paid more attention to Sergeant Kessler than I did to any college professor, for no college professor ever said to me, “The pilot will say ‘Eject, eject, eject,’ three times. By the third ‘eject,’ he’s going, so you might want to, too.” I felt a warm rush of relief when Sergeant Kessler said that the pilot has the option of ejecting both of us. Confident that my brain—assuming it had any blood left in it—would react hysterically to any syllables remotely sounding like “eject,” I rejoiced in this datum. Consolation, however, turned to consternation when he began displaying the one-man life raft that would be dangling from my waist on the descent. “A raft,” I asked. “In the desert?” Oh well, don’t ask, don’t tell.

Now he showed me the survival radio—the same type that pilot Scott O’Grady had with him during his five days on the ground in Bosnia, instructing me that I must turn off my emergency beacon before I could use the radio. Finally there was the laminated 121-page Air Force survival pamphlet. I flipped it open at random and saw that I was to rub my body with dirt to disguise body odor, and how to make good use of animal organs. The last two pages confirmed the adage that there are no atheists in foxholes:

WITH OTHER SURVIVORS:

In walked the Thunderbirds themselves, back from their morning practice. In one month, they would leave for their two-hundred-day annual tour, during which they give about seventy shows. There are eight pilots, six of whom perform in the show. The other two are the operations officer and the advance pilot/narrator who goes on ahead to make arrangements and then narrates the shows, describing to the crowds what it is exactly that the Thunderbirds are doing, other than apparently trying to commit synchronized suicide in front of tens of thousands of people.

It’s an interesting sensation being in a room with eight Thunderbird pilots. When I reported it later to my wife, she swooned, “Be still my heart.” The leader, Lt. Col. Ron “Maxi” Mumm makes Tom Cruise, star of the movie Top Gun, look like Pee Wee Herman. The others, some of them veterans of Desert Storm who flew F-117s and F-4G Wild Weasels, were not lacking in the stud department.

But then what were you expecting, chopped liver? These men are the cream of the cream, the top gun percentile of the U.S. Air Force, chosen not only for their ability to fly upside down on top of each other at 400 mph, but for the image they collectively present. The Thunderbirds are nothing if not Public Relations. Seventy-five percent of Air Force recruits say that they have signed up because of the Thunderbirds. With a yearly budget of $1.9 million, roughly one-tenth the cost of one F-16, that makes the Thunderbirds a very cost-effective recruitment device; they don’t even have to take out ads on late night TV promising that swabbing decks is going to be an adventure, not a job.

I was introduced to my pilot, Thunderbird No. 8, Capt. Daniel R. Torweihe, a thirty-six-year-old handsome, broad-faced, blue-eyed former bricklayer from Wisconsin, looking quite knightly in red show suit, white “fram” ascot, and blue flight cap. I could see why he’d been selected as the team’s narrator: he has a Disneyland-upbeat tenor: “O-kay, Chris, if you’re ready, we’ll walk out to the aircraft and go flying. It looks like we’re going to have a great day!” I liked him immediately, but then you bond quickly with someone who is going to fly you upside down at nearly the speed of sound.

Commander “Maxi” Mumm told me that the visibility was “hundred miles-plus” and, as I was leaving, asked if I wanted some of his lunch chili. I considered two possibilities behind his offer of spicy Mexican food moments before subjecting my stomach to nine times the force of gravity: this was either fighter jock sangfroid, or an evil practical trick on his colleague Capt. Torweihe. I politely declined, and instead made one last visit to the head, where I noticed that the autographed photo from the Navy’s Blue Angels flying team hangs over the urinal.

Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff that the astronauts, just before blasting off from Cape Canaveral, would utter the silent prayer: “Oh Lord, don’t let me f- - - up.” I made my own prayer into the bathroom mirror: “Oh Lord, don’t let me throw up.”

We walked out onto the apron, where nine Thunderbird F-16s sat gleaming in the sunlight, cockpit canopies up like broken shotgun breeches.

Two F-117 stealth fighter-bombers were in the line of planes next to ours, looking like high-tech bats. I asked, “What’s it like to fly one of those?” Dan shrugged, “It’s really just a bomber.” There isn’t much aesthetic grace to an F-117, only low-hung, black malevolence, whereas the F-16 Fighting Falcon has the sleek, sporty lines of a Ferrari. Paint it military gray and fit it out with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles and Mk-82 Snakeye 500-pound bombs and you have a Tom Clancy wet dream. In sparkly red, white and blue Thunderbird colors, devoid of the instruments of war, it almost smiles at you.

We walked past nine planes, over a quarter billion dollars worth of aircraft, to Thunderbird No. 8. Two very friendly, upbeat crew chiefs named T-Bone and Mike helped to strap me tightly into the backseat, and connected my oxygen mask and parachute harness. Whatever else comes of this, I thought, I will never again feel scrunched in economy class. T-Bone pointed out the switch to the cockpit video camera mounted on the dashboard, presumably so that I could turn it off while I threw up, or blubbered with fear. Just before the canopy closed down, sealing me inside my snug metallic cocoon, Mike stuck two small plastic bags with ties into my G suit at either knee. “You won’t be needing these,” he grinned illogically.

Capt. Dan was now in his front seat, though I could only see the top of his red helmet over the headrest. “How’re we doing?” he said over the intercom. I was breathing through my oxygen mask like Darth Vader in Star Wars: pssshhttt Great pssssshhttt.

He started the engine, a low whine that steadily built, making the cockpit needles quiver and the people on the tarmac cover their ears. A word about this Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-220 turbofan engine: it produces twenty-five thousand pounds of thrust. We would weigh twenty-three thousand pounds on takeoff. Any craft with a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than one-to-one is essentially a rocket. Cut off the wings and it will still fly, if erratically. Craning my head to one side, I could barely make out the wings. The total wingspan is only thirty-two feet.

Over my amplified breathing I could hear Dan request a “straight climb to sixteen thousand” feet from Nellis Control. During the pre-flight briefing he had told me that we would take off and then accelerate to 400 knots and then climb vertically, straight up, to sixteen thousand in about eight seconds. Nellis is at about two thousand feet above sea level, so our rate of climb would be seventeen hundred feet per second. The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet. So clearly this is a rapid way of getting to sixteen thousand feet.

“O-kay, Chris, if you’re ready, we’ll be taking off. Here we go.”

I’d be dishonest if I said that I remembered much of it, but reconstructing: we lifted fifty or so feet off the runway at 150 knots. Dan increased speed. “O-kay, now I’m going to add the afterburners.…” I do remember an amazing sensation of speed and being shoved back into the seat.

We increased speed to 450 miles an hour. (Big commercial jets take off at about 130.) I think I remember another hearty “O-kay” from the front, but then my world went weird. I recall that it became suddenly very eerily quiet inside. How they manage that, I don’t know, since being near one of these birds on takeoff will leave you saying “Beg pardon?” for the rest of your life. I suppose Mr. Doppler has something to do with it. Either way, I remember no sound, only a vise squeezing everything below my waist. The G suit had automatically inflated to compensate for the four Gs of our vertical ascent.

The video records that I turned my head to the side, but I have no memory of that, only of Dan’s reassuring voice saying, with wonder in it, “Seven thousand, ten thousand … O-kay, leveling off at fifteen thousand, five hundred feet,” at which point I found myself looking up through the canopy at Nellis Air Force Base, three miles below. We were upside down. Nice touch.

“How’d you like that?”

I wish I could report that I said something more interesting than, “Wow,” but it’s all on video. I did have the presence of mind, at least, to ask where was the drinks cart. And the sense to reach back and toggle myself some 100 percent pure oxygen, as my stomach was telling me, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

“Okay, Chris, we’ll fly about forty miles to the northwest, and then I’ll turn the aircraft over to you.”

I liked the just-flying-straight for forty miles part, though I wasn’t at all sure about the taking over the aircraft part. We were now going about 400 mph. There was no sense of speed, other than the airspeed indicator. And, come to think of it, the clouds that were going by sort of briskly.

We did our forty miles in no time and were now over a much-practice-bombed quadrant of the Nevada desert called Indian Springs. It was here, in January 1982, that the Thunderbirds suffered their worst disaster: four T-38s flying the “line abreast” formation did a loop and crashed into the ground. The four scorch marks in the desert floor were eerily symmetrical. The reconstruction revealed that the stabilizer—the part of the tail that keeps an aircraft flying steadily—on the lead pilot’s plane had jammed, so that instead of coming out of the loop, the equivalent of a back flip off a diving board, he went into the ground at 478 mph. The other three pilots, eyes trained to stay on the next man, followed him into the ground. A total of eighteen Thunderbirds have been killed since 1953.

“Okay, Chris, I’m going to do an aileron roll now.”

We rolled upside down and over. All very smooth and effortless.

“All right, you have the aircraft.”

I used to fly a Piper Cherokee, which is to an F-16 what a bumble bee is to a falcon. I remember struggling with the trim tab to get the wheel so that I didn’t have to push it or pull it to fly straight-and-level. I took the stick in my right hand and nudged it to the left, imperceptibly, ever so cautiously. Immediately we were upside down.

“Fan-tastic!” said Dan, as if I had performed brilliantly. This is simply Thunderbird politesse. Another nudge and we were right side up again.

“Ready for a loop?”

It would be nice to report that I was indeed avid for a loop, but the truth is I was avid for something else. I turned off the camera, not wanting this moment to became a permanent part of the record. Here I had a fleeting moment of panic wondering if I would be able to remove my oxygen mask in time. This is essential to the operation I was about to undertake, unless you want to fill your lungs with breakfast. (I understand this is medically undesirable.) It came off—Praise the Lord—in one swoop. I hoped the intercom would not be too unpleasant for poor Dan. So much for homeopathic antimotion-sickness remedies.

I felt much better afterward, despite the sweat that was pouring off my face and collecting like a puddle inside the oxygen mask. I was ready, more or less, to do the loop.

“Okay,” said Dan, “let’s add the smoke.…” The smoke trail allows you to see how round a loop you have done. My G suit inflated and I strained and grunted against four Gs. All in all it feels as though an extremely fat person has suddenly plumped down onto your lap. At the apex of the loop there was a confusing moment of upside-down five Gs—if I’ve got this right—weightlessness, essentially, followed by decidedly positive Gs as we came out of the loop into our own smoke trail. That part of it was cool. But now it was time again to avail myself of the baggie at my knee.

“How we doing?” Dan asked. After listening to my imitation of a distressed walrus, he said solicitously, “Remember, we’re up here to have fun, so we can do as much or as little as you want. If you want, we can just do some sight-seeing.”

If it is possible, as the general would say, for one man to love another man, that was the moment; but merely to sightsee would have been like taking a Ferrari out on the track and driving around it at 65 mph.

We did a vertical roll. I can report that this was the most nauseogenic of our maneuvers. Indeed, watching the videotape of it, on my bed a few minutes ago made me blanch anew and my scalp tingle with sweat. First we dropped down to about a thousand feet off the ground, then it was back on the throttle and vertically up, up, up for many thousands of feet, only this time rotating 360 degrees three times.

“How was that?”

“Great,” I gasped. After availing myself of the baggie for the third time, I declined Dan’s kind offer of performing another vertical roll myself. Instead we did a zero-G maneuver: a brief parabola at the apex of which you become weightless. Dan instructed me beforehand to remove a glove. The video shows the glove levitating off my lap, bouncing off the canopy. He said that on long, boring flights, pilots sometimes play a little game where the front-seater sips some water and does the parabola, then spits it out and with the stick guides the suspended droplet, quivering in the air like a silverly ball of mercury, backward until it plops down onto the lap of the guy in the back seat. I don’t think they do this while bombing Baghdad.

We did something called an eight-point roll, a 360-degree rotation in eight, jerky installments. “One-” jerk “two-” jerk “three-” jerk … My own eight-point roll was considerably less fluid than Dan’s.

It was now time for the thing I was frankly not looking forward to, the nine-G turn. Dan kept politely insisting that we did not have to do nine Gs, but I had read enough about the Thunderbirds to know that “orientation fliers” such as my sad-ass self are divided into two kinds, those who do nine-G turns, and those who do not.

Dan’s tone of voice became slightly more businesslike, instructing me to tense all my muscles and hold my breath, put my hands on my lap, keep my spine straight and head back. I recall thinking that it can’t be possible to throw up during a nine-G maneuver, since everything is pressing down.

“Okay, I’ll put the nose down now so we’ll gain some speed … add the afterburners.” I felt a surge forward as the F-16 accelerated to .85 Mach, or 550 knots.

“Okay, Chris, are you ready?”

“Uh hunf.” I was already tensed to the consistency of granite.

“Okay, here we gooooo …” We were sideways to the ground now. Dan pulled back hard on the stick and we went into a tight turn.

The G suit inflated to the maximum. My hands pressed down onto my crotch. A crushingly heavy weight pushed down on my body. My helmet was nailed to the headrest. I was aware of a slight shuddering. The video shows the wings shaking. Somewhere a voice I did not recognize said, “Bingo, bingo!” Dan later explained that this was a fuel-warning device he had preset. At cruising speed, the F-16 carries enough fuel to stay aloft for two hours and ten minutes. With the afterburners on, it will use up all its fuel in fifteen minutes, which pretty much limits the number of nine-G turns you can do while dogfighting over enemy territory. In one hour and ten minutes of flying, we used two and a half tons of fuel.

But now I was aware of Dan’s voice again …

“… Seven … eight … there it is, nine!”

“We did it?”

“You sure did!” I appreciated the “you,” even if all I had done was to strain through the bowel movement from hell. But there it is on the video of the heads-up display, the pilot’s TelePrompTer-like screen that displays all his instruments, a little digital “9.1” at the lower left-hand corner.

The entire turn had lasted five seconds. I had not blacked out, or even lost any peripheral vision, my solitary, pathetic moment of triumph that morning. I don’t think I could have lasted another two seconds without blacking out. During their aerial shows, the Thunderbirds execute a seven-G turn lasting eighteen seconds, at a hundred and fifty feet above the ground. No margin of error for blacking out there. That is why Thunderbirds tend to be in their early thirties and possessed of great physical strength.

The audio portion of the video records a high-pitched whine as we came out of the turn. I think that was me. The camera shows me looking pale, but giving two wan thumbs-up. Then I turned it off, not wanting my memento of the day to show the gastrointestinal aftereffects of nine Gs.

We did a victory lap over Hoover Dam. Just before landing, Dan did two tight three-G turns to shed airspeed, but by now they hardly amounted to shucks, and then we were on the ground. The canopy was lifting, fresh, desert air filling the cockpit. I came down the ladder slowly, stood wobbily beside Dan for a photo while he pinned a Nine G button on my flight suit. Then I crawled to the Life Support Room where I availed myself of a trash basket in the corner. We did the debriefing, watching the video, Dan sitting beside me hungrily eating an aromatic nitrite-red weiner with chili.

The nine-G turn doesn’t look like much on the video. All you see is a shifting of sunlight and a dark-visored figure crushed inert in his seat. The only sound is the loud, three-second exhalations, the strange “Bingo, bingo,” and a high-pitched whine that might have been the last of my air being crowbarred out of my lungs. I had to make a conscious effort to stay awake in the debriefing room, even though I was watching a video of myself in the cockpit of a fighter plane. But there was an insight in this fatigue. This is how they will feel, a lifetime of dinner guests glancing frantically at each other: Oh God, here it comes, his Thunderbirds video. Tell him we have a baby-sitter and have to get home.

—Forbes FYI, 1996