Airplane f 16 falcon coloring page4/1/2024 The team, which is to the Air Force what the Blue Angels, with their F/A-18 jets, are to the Navy, performed in New York in May. The Air Force sometimes offers journalists the chance to ride in an F-16 when the Thunderbirds are in town. The plane wrote checks my body couldn’t cash It’s not unusual for rookies to feel pummeled by the Gs-some even lose consciousness-and shaken to the point of puking from air sickness. The force pushes blood away from your eyes and brain, potentially giving you tunnel vision. A crushing feeling pushes you back into your seat. It’s hard to describe the frightening sensation of pulling heavy Gs. (Astronauts typically endure three or four during liftoff, and an F-16 and its pilot can handle nine.) The sudden moves were part of our G-exercise, a standard practice before any flight that might hit the crew with high Gs to ensure that the plane, and anyone aboard, can take the stress. I experienced 6.2 Gs during the maneuver. We cruised to the Garden State, and Flack made a 90-degree turn, then a brutal 180-degree turn-a hard long pull and a steep bank angle. Flack ended the climb by leveling us out with a slow roll. I weigh around 155 pounds, but at that acceleration, it felt like I weighed more than 800. That took all of about 30 seconds and hit us with 5.4 Gs, or more than five times the force of gravity. The seats on an F-16 are reclined at an angle of 30 degrees, so a 60-degree climb feels like you’re going straight up. Moments after becoming airborne, Flack pulled back on the control stick in his right hand, sending us into a 60-degree climb at something north of 400 mph. We screamed off the ground and into a partly cloudy blue sky on a windy morning in late May. We had taken off some 20 minutes earlier, all eight stages of the jet’s afterburners lit and rocketing us down a runway at MacArthur Airport on Long Island. “Rob, how’s it going, man?” Flack asked, his voice coming in through the speakers in my red, white, and blue helmet. The crushing turns and fast choppy maneuvers were physically punishing-a roller coaster ride I wanted to end. He brought us back to horizontal, then pulled the plane hard to the right. A moment later, Markzon-whose Air Force call sign is Flack-abruptly rolled the aircraft on its side, a maneuver known as a knife-edge pass that put the plane’s stubby wings perpendicular to the ground. Jason Markzon, the pilot of our F-16 fighter jet, had just steered the plane through two tight, hard turns, part of an aviation procedure called the G-exercise. Somewhere high above New Jersey, I yanked the oxygen mask off my face, worried I was about to throw up.
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