Spin and Puke 2: The Merry-Go-Round from Hell

It's been a pretty wild couple of weeks and unfortunately I haven't had a whole lot of time to keep this journal updated. However, I'll try to give you all the Cliff Notes as best I can, it's still pretty long so it'll take a couple paragraphs to work up to the title... and I put a picture in near the end.

The next morning after selection I got into a TC-12 (the same Beechcraft King-Air that I flew out to Las Cruces on) at 8am and with a few other folks was flown back to Pensacola, FL. There I spent 5 days hanging out with all the friends I'd left there after API and all the friends who've moved there to train in Helos. That afternoon I went laser sailing with one of my best friends, then we got a group of friends from the Academy and Primary to go out for dinner and drinks. The next day we went to the beach and the day after, the guys from Corpus and I all went up to Milton to see our helicopter friends and ended up floating down a river in inner-tubes with a cooler of beer.

Having grown up on the water, I typically have this instinctual habit of either not taking anything in my swim-suit pockets or physically tying whatever I'd need to my body. I've lost too many things over-board, sunglasses, knives, hats, Post 53 beeper (though I totally fixed that one) and whatever else that was once mine and is now somewhere on the bottom of Long Island Sound between Sheffield Light and Captain Harbor. Not everyone has learned this lesson.

Anyways, we left our rental car at the head of the river and some friends at the bottom. Our driver put the keys in the button-pocket of his bathing suit, and thus the car spent the night in the middle of the woods until we could get a lock-smith truck over a mile down a park-access dirt road to cut us a new one, computer coded and all. That next night worked out because I got to see some more friends out there before heading back to Pensacola and then back to Corpus Tuesday afternoon.

Oh, that's right, there was training involved... yeah we spent a couple hours on Monday and Tuesday learning how to use an ejection seat as well as swimming in the pool with all the gear required of it. Honestly, it's easier than the T-34C gear that I wore, but at the same time, I definitely got the impression that there's nothing good about ejecting. Sure, pulling a handle and then having the seat do the rest is pretty nice, much nicer than physically opening the canopy, manually disconnecting yourself from the airplane and then "from a crouched position, dive towards the trailing edge of either wing, when clear of the aircraft, pull d-ring (rip cord)." However, I'm much less excited about experiencing 30 Gs instantly, possibly losing an inch of height or any number of "flail injuries," "seat slap" or whatever else we supposedly learned about there. In any case, we were there for a 5 day psued0-vacation to do about 5-6 hours of actual training, it was pretty great.

That left me about 1 day to get ready for the movers who came on Thursday (selection +1 week). Friday I said my goodbyes to Corpus and on Saturday morning the MG (which is sort-of repaired after the whole 'cylinder head' thing) and I hit the road for Meridian. That night my buddy and I split a hotel room in New Orleans. It's kinda sad when you're too tired to enjoy Bourbon St. and just kinda hang out in a restaurant until it's time to go to bed... not that I'm complaining because New Orleans, in any state of mind, is pretty cool.

I checked into Training Wing 1 at NAS Meridian Monday morning in much the same way that I checked into Training Wing 4 in Corpus. The next day I got on a plane for beautiful Lemoore, CA to participate in one day of "Centrifuge Flight Environment Training" or "C-FET" for short.

After a pretty standard airline experience, hitting Atlanta, Denver and finally Fresno and also after a groggy midnight rental car drive through the California desert my head hit the pillow at Lemoore's BOQ at just around 1am on Thursday. 5 hours later I was somehow up and throwing on the flight suit and boots. Breakfast was McDonald's and class was down the street where I had a mini-reunion with a couple NFO (Naval Flight Officer) friends and one pilot friend.

We then had a few lectures given by various instructors of flight medicine. Really, I was pretty groggy and I really couldn't tell you a whole lot that went on that morning. I do remember some important facts though.

Our eyes are under pressure, so when the Gs come on (think of going up on a really fast elevator, but 4-5 times that) and our blood pressure drops as our blood is pushed down to our feet, our eyes stop functioning first. That means that when the blood can't overcome the eye's pressure and we black out, our brain's are still receiving oxygen... but for about 5 seconds longer. It also explains why as we get closer to blacking out, we "gray out" so that our eyes become less effective and we lose color vision or have a tunneling effect. Medically it's pretty cool...

If in a high-G environment and we black out, it means our circulatory system can't cope anymore and we're about to "G-loc" or have an episode of "G-induced Loss of Consciousness." That's not a good thing, not only are you probably utterly miserable up until the point when you lose it, but when one you wake up typically you'd flail your arms around like a seizure patient for a few seconds and then be totally confused for up to a half hour later. What's even worse is that if this happens and you're not in Lemoore's centrifuge or some horrible amusement park ride, you're in an airplane and probably traveling pretty fast which means you can only hope that somehow you'll miss the ground.

So it was pretty serious, this training in Lemoore. The actual time in the centrifuge took only about 10-15 minutes but it's not an experience I will soon forget. I was actually one of the last guys to go, so I spent most of the time in between napping or grabbing a light lunch (emphasis on light..).
When my turn came up I went with the attitude that it'll be a rough experience, but like an amusement park ride, probably not that bad. I got suited up with a loaner G-suit, harness and some survival gear. The next thing I know, I'm strapped into an ejection seat, inside a gimbaled capsule at the end of a 125,000 rotating arm attached to a 1,400 HP GE electric motor capable of accelerating this behemoth... with me inside to 9 Gs in less than 2 seconds (we only go up to 7.5).

Inside there's a computer screen to look at that has a picture of what looks like a T-34C with cross hairs on it. Additionally there's a stick and fake throttle to hold on to as well as some other lights, handles, speaker and a large microphone. One of the instructors talked each of us through the whole sequence. The thing starts spinning (oh and if you remember, I don't like spinning very much... see "Bananas") and I'm told they're going to test my resting G tolerance so all I have to do is sit there (with no help from my G-suit) and release the dead-man's switch on the stick when I lose about 60% of my vision. Oh, by the way, I have no idea what G force I'm at or for how long, even though you can see it on the video (which I'm trying to post, at some point).

So I kinda half-smile and have a "okay, let's get on with it" attitude, I click the dead-man switch and the thing starts going. It was very slow but all of sudden I started to feel worse than I'd ever felt in the T-34C. My vision started to get all spotty and then my peripheral vision went away and I could only just about see the TV screen. I released the switch and the machine basically stopped on a dime, which, going from full rotation to nothing... get on a Merry-Go-Round, a small fast one, have a strong friend... like a body-builder type, spin you really really fast and then stop it, just see you feel after that.

On my Merry-Go-Round from Hell, my resting G tolerance was 4.1 times the force of gravity. That means that I could hang out on the surface of a planet 4.1 times the size of Earth and not really have a problem, or do a loop in the T-34C without feeling anything. It's a normal tolerance, not great, but not bad at all. Now, if I were a smoker, didn't run as much, ate a lot of salty foods and were over-weight, I would probably have a much better tolerance. In fact, a less athletic friend of mine (though pretty healthy over-all) had a super-human, freakishly high G-tolerance of 7. If it puts it in perspective, I didn't have the strength to inhale... to breathe after 5 Gs.

Then they took me to one G above resting so I could practice my "Anti-G strain" which is a maneuver where we clench all the muscles in our lower body, breathe and close our epiglottis, forcing the air in our lungs to a high pressure to keep as much blood in our brains as possible. That maneuver alone allows us to sustain at the very least 3 Gs above our resting (the G-suit only offers 1 G of protection, by the way). Anyway, I wasn't ready and basically fell over in the seat, so I tried it again and was fine, but I realized at that point that, well, they were playing for serious and this was no amusement park ride. This was something I had to suck up and get through no matter what, so at the very least I wouldn't get near the damn thing ever again.

6 Gs was even worse and honestly, my vision dimmed a little every time, but no tunnel vision or anything. Seriously, this stuff is miserable, it's like you're being crushed by something you can't see, but can definitely feel. Breathing, like I said, is next to impossible, you try to inhale and no air goes in, in fact, air probably leaks out. The only reason we do these little gasping breaths is so that we unclench and let blood flow in and out of our head for a second. The G-suit has a lot of pressure in it, but you don't feel it because everything else is clenched or being crushed anyways. In the resting phase of the "Air Combat Maneuver" sequence of 3 Gs, resting at 3 times the force of gravity (which was actually pretty that we can do that, by the way), you suddenly felt all these painful spots all in you back, butt and legs start to develop.

At 6 and above, I really don't remember thinking about a lot of things aside from willing myself to stay strained and remembering how to breathe. At one point, at our max of 7.5 Gs, while I'm just miserable and kinda feeling like I'm going to lose it, I remember hearing the instructor, who's coaching me like I'm an athlete yell, "COME ON SIR, YOU WANT TO BE AN AVIATOR!!!" That set off some sort of alarm in my head and in the video you see my eyes bug out a bit as I bear down just that much more and get through it.

Finally, the last bit was 12 seconds at 7.5 Gs with our head turned to the side to pretend like we're being chased by another plane and we're looking back. It's so we can strain while in some weird body position. First of all, I had to rest for about 3 minutes just to get rid of the spins (for me it really felt like when you've been drinking a little and you want to go to bed, but nothing seems right and you know if you close your eyes you'll throw up).
Finally I'm ready and bam, I'm at 7.5 Gs, my face is sucked back to my skull like in all those movies (Spies Like Us with Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd does a great centrifuge bit... hilarious). My head's turned to the side and I'm just trying to get through, the instructors saying something, I don't know what and my vision's starting to close in. I strained harder, I'm still holding on and then suddenly I feel something like an explosion of pain in the very back right part of my head. I have some stilted thought like "ow, crap, aneurysm?, okay no, still conscious, #$%&-ing over yet?" and then we're done, in fact I wasn't even sure if I'd made it, but I did.

In conclusion, that's the worse it'll ever be, even the F/A-18 can't hold that many Gs for that long and I made it. 3 people in our class of 12 either G-loc-ed or almost G-loc-ed (when they just get visibly loopy for a couple seconds) and had to re-do it. I survived, but I am not ashamed to say that machine kicked my ass. I haven't had a good beating since maybe that one time in Plebe year boxing (though I never went down, mind you) and honestly I probably needed this slice of humble pie to remind me that I'm going to be dealing with forces, in a life and death sort of way, that are wayyyy more powerful than I am.


I got back to the hotel room, totally exhausted, I felt like I'd just run about 8 miles. I immediately got out of my flight suit and into bed to watch some mindless movie, but before that I had to see what this thing had done to my body. First of all, I realized that the pain in my head was a muscle strain from holding up my head which, at times, weighed about 80 lbs (my whole. I had bruises in all sorts of random places. My ankles were blue from all the blood rushing down and the sides of my butt, where the seat and the G-suit (which is like ass-less chaps with pressurized-air bladders by the way) weren't. My back had a big rectangular one from some harness buckle that had been pressed into me by 7.5 times my body's weight (which is to say that I literally weighed 1237.5lbs at 7.5 Gs). Additionally on the bottoms of my arms and legs and all up and down my side and my back I had these little tiny red dots called "G-measles." They occur when all that blood pools at the lowest extremity under such pressure that the capillaries just burst. I'm told they make your skin look older, but hey, it's not on my face, and they were gone in under a week.

We all went out to celebrate surviving and the next morning at 6am I was back on the road to Fresno to fly back. Of course the flight back was miserable, not only did I not enjoy sitting down to begin with, but the heat went out on the plane from Fresno to Denver and all us nearly froze from the cold 30,000' air blasting into the cabin.

My new roommate is in the process of buying a house, so I've been helping him out with that and getting all the admin stuff I need to do to check in done. I'm still living like a hobo, but I'll be in a house in a few weeks. I don't start school until September 15th so I'm just going to burn all my leave and money by going to various weddings around the country. I still have a small hope that maybe I'll get back to France this summer, but it's looking less and less likely. However, there are at least 15 French navy pilots here so I'm definitely getting about as much language practice as I did last summer when I worked at the American Embassy. That's about it for now, I'm finally at a point where I can start to relax, but then again I won't even fly until the fall, so it's a mixed blessing. In either case, hopefully I'll get to spend some time home as well.