Flight Puts The ‘Gee’ In G-Force Thunderbird Pilot Puts Pressure On Reporter During Heart-Stopping Ride

FOR THE RECORD: 8-6-2000 Caption wrong: The photograph of a F-16D jet in Thursday’s paper was incorrectly attributed. The photographer was Sgt. Justin D. Pyle of the USAF Thurderbirds.

I know my eyes are open. I know that it is a brilliantly clear summer day, but darkness collapses in from the edges of my vision so that all that remains is a smudge of light at the center.

Maj. Mike Byrne, pilot of the F-16 I’m flying in, has been counting as the G-forces have increased through a high speed turn.

“Four, five, six,” he said.

We are at 15,000 feet. In Byrne’s right hand is the control to the fighter jet. It will move only one-quarter inch in any direction. For him to put this jet through a 9-G turn, he must put 25 pounds of pressure on the stick.

When his count reaches seven, I feel like he is talking to me from a distant place, not from the cockpit we share.

When he reaches eight and nine, I am only dimly aware of his voice. I don’t hear the roar of the jet. I’m hardly aware of the sky and clouds outside.

The landscape below that seemed so spectacular has ceased to matter in my consciousness.

It’s as if only the deepest parts of my brain still work - the parts that deal with terror. I’m being wadded up and stuffed into a soup can.

I can’t breathe. If I had to scream for help I don’t think I could.

It lasts one second. When it is over, I cannot move or talk. I feel as if I’ve just been tackled by a football team, and all I was wearing was pajamas.

During his Air Force career, Byrne has been in a turn like this for 25 seconds. One G is the Earth’s normal gravitational pull. Nine Gs is nine times that force.

A U.S. Air Force Thunderbird pilot, Byrne is spending 45 minutes of his Friday afternoon giving me a “media flight” in hopes I’ll explain to the public a bit of what the Air Force does and what its weaponry is capable of.

On Saturday, six Thunderbirds - in their red, white and blue F-16s - will give a free performance before more than 50,000 people at Fairchild Air Force Base, as part of the base’s annual air show.

Before every show, the Thunderbirds take a couple of civilians up and try to fill them with awe. It’s an easy assignment.

Costing roughly $20 million each, the F-16 can fly at twice the speed of sound. It can accelerate straight up. It can do a 9-G turn and take 3 negative Gs. It is part of America’s military aviation backbone.

On this day, it is just a wild ride for a tall, skinny guy who gets motion sick riding an elevator.

At 9 Gs my body weighs 1,400 pounds. Blood wants to drain out of my brain and out of my heart. To prevent this, I’m supposed to do an “anti-G straining maneuver.”

The Thunderbirds flight surgeon, Capt. Jay Flottmann said beforehand that I need to flex every muscle in my body. Then I need to take a deep breath, hold it for three seconds and then do a brief “air exchange,” which is just a short exhale and sip of air.

When Flottmann demonstrated, it sounded like a metal door opening and closing quickly. Exhale too much and you won’t be able to breathe - too much force on your chest.

“It will feel like an elephant is standing there,” Flottmann said.

I haven’t had a lot of experience with elephants standing on my chest and after taking 9 Gs, I have no desire to.

When the turn came, I exhaled too much. I dimly remember wishing that my rib cage came down past my hips. My entire groin and abdomen felt as if they were going to pop my head off.

Why would anybody want to do such a thing?

“A 9-G turn is what we would do to avoid a missile or an an enemy aircraft,” Byrne said.

Byrne has been behind the controls of aircraft since he was a teenager growing up in the Midwest. He tried to get interested in medicine by earning a biology degree from Bowling Green State University, but nothing had as much fire for him as flying.

I had been told his nickname was “Slam.” A moniker I feared had something to do with slamming the passengers of F-16s back in their seats.

But there was never a slam. Byrne wouldn’t do something like that unless I asked him. His nickname comes from being quick-witted and able to slam people verbally.

He and many of the other Thunderbirds are a far cry from the “Top Gun” image of Hollywood. He’s married, has two children and says the hardest part about flying is being away from his family - up to 250 days a year.

Thunderbird pilots will never call themselves elite. They insist that they only do the same maneuvers that every other fighter pilot in the Air Force learns.

One of those maneuvers is the knife edge, where the craft is snapped on its side and then snapped back. My stomach did not like this. As a precaution, my preflight safety guru, Senior Airman Kyle Puntney, gave me two small, white bags in case I felt like I wanted to store the contents of my stomach someplace else.

“Mike, we don’t need to do any more stuff like that,” I said, covered in sweat and trying to keep from messing up his nice cockpit window.

We flew level and steady for a while. When the F-16 isn’t slashing through the sky like the tip of a rapier, it is as smooth as sitting in a living room recliner.

Then Byrne gave me the stick, the ultimate in power steering. The slightest touch and the jet moved. I didn’t want to give the aircraft back when Byrne asked for it.

Feeling better, he took me on on a zero-G maneuver. At the top of a high arc the jet undergoes zero-G and everything in the cockpit floats - the one glove I had removed, the straps on my oxygen mask and me.

Strangely, this calmed my stomach and I was ready for some high-G turns. We went up to 6 twice and then Byrne talked me into doing 9.

What’s a few more seconds of pressure, I thought. It’s enough time for blood to drain out of a person’s optic nerve and make them lose their vision. It’s enough, that hours later I feel narrower. I am flat man.

And after the turn, is Byrne’s cheery voice over the radio: “You did it. How you doing back there?”

I really don’t feel like talking. I just would be satisfied with breathing and having my heart restart.

How do these pilots do this stuff?

It’s then I realize, that the most incredible thing about the Thunderbirds is not the jets, but the people who fly them.

This sidebar appeared with the story: The air show

The Thunderbirds perform at 3:20 p.m. Saturday at Fairchild Air Force Base. The gates for the annual air show open at 9:30 a.m. and the event is free.