How perishable are flying skills? You flew the F16 Block15 right? Would you be able to do so today, with minimal retraining? How much refresher would someone returning to a squadron after 3 years at the Pentagon need?
Late to the party but my 2 cents as a complete layman who got to ride in the back seat of a T-38 on a simulated bombing run.
I was expecting the experience to be like a roller coaster on steroids. Or like driving on a racetrack, which I had some limited experience doing at the time. Lots of g-forces in all directions. Nope.
The understanding that I walked away with, and pilots correct me if I’m wrong, is that there are tiny little control surfaces to adjust yaw and roll, but when you pitch the plane up you’re presenting a gigantic flat area (the bottom of the plane and wings) to the still air in the direction of travel. This means that planes can change direction violently when they’re climbing, but not so violently in any other direction. Want to turn left? Roll left and then “climb.” Want to dive? Roll over 90 degrees and then “climb” towards the ground (like Oakminster describes).
The net result was that I never felt any g-forces in any direction other than “down,” although I was never quite sure which direction that was. There may have been other directional forces acting on me, but they were all drowned out by the overwhelming sensation of being squished into the bottom of my seat. Over and over again. There was no left, no right, only down. No sensation of getting light in your seat, just crushed in the other direction.
That’s a big simplification as to the aerodynamics, but it’s spot-on in terms of your perception from onboard and why it’s done that way.
Substantially all the Gs are what we call positive pitch Gs, so forces “down” from head to butt from the crew’s POV. Where the Earth is almost, but not quite, immaterial.
So your main experience is a sudden & violent roll to some angle, a momentary pause, then a slam of pitch G to move the nose “up” in the plane you’re now aligned with, then a moment of zero G, then another violent roll to a new plane, then repeat until done.
Bombing is done the same way except once pointed at the target you pause for 2 to 3 seconds of very gently nudging the controls to get everything lined up just right, mash the release button, feel/hear the bombs fall away, then back to slamming around as you make your escape.
“Yanking and banking” is the slang term and it pretty well describes how it’s done. Though it really should have been “banking & yanking”: first “bank” (i.e. roll) to the desired plane of motion then “yank” the stick back to generate Gs & turning, then “unyank” to unload to zero G to stop everything moving. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I was F-16 block 10. All of which are in museums now. That was 28 years ago now. :eek:
The fact I’ve been flying jet airplanes most of this time would help, but I’d still be starting from not too far above somebody who’d never flown fighters. I’d get the idea real quick, since I mostly still have that. But the doing it and doing it fast enough is another matter. I’m still in good physical condition, but that extra 28 years is not gonna help me vs. my classmates who were born in 1988-1992.
In my era the initial training for your first fighter took about 9 months. If you were changing from one fighter type to another (e.g. F-4 to F-16) the school was about 4 months. And returning to the same aircraft you’d last flown after a 3-year ground tour was about 6 weeks.
Regardless of the which course you came through there’d be a local tune-up course for a month or so at your new squadron before you were declared a battle ready journeyman.
Different aircraft have varying degrees of versatility of mission. e.g. the F-14 and F-15 were air-to-air only, the A-10 was CAS only, the A-6 was air-to-ground attack & nuke only.
Whereas the F-16 & F/A-18 did it all: air-to-air, air-to-ground attack, CAS, & nuke. The more versatile the aircraft type, the more individual units specialized in some subset of the total capability. So for the versatile jets the main training programs would get you to very skilled apprentice level in everything and the local tune-up would finish you to journeyman in only the skills your unit needed.
Since the conversation has moved on to flying experiences, I thought you might be interested in today’s obituary of a Fleet Air Arm pilot Captain Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown.
A remarkable man.
One of the all-time classic examples of this: “Swede” Vejtasa at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Flying a dive bomber, not a fighter, he fought alone against three Japanese Zeroes, which had every advantage except the ruggedness to sustain high-G maneuvering. So, for more than 17 minutes, Vejtasa used that sole advantage, maneuvering at extremely high G.
Somewhat dramatically recounted in an episode of Dogfights:
Do not (Do so) Do not (Do so) Do not (Do so) …
I’m sure you don’t meen you’ve been on all inverted roller coasters. The point I was making, in my own inadequate way, was that one roller coaster was different than all the other roller coasters I’ve been on.
Yes, very different from the simple loop that just turned us upside down and shook us, but also very different (high g) from the common barrel-roll, where, although you never go negative-g, they still warn you not to leave your glasses in your shirt pocket.
Is this typical? Well, I was responding to a post that observed that airplane acrobatics didn’t jerk you around the way a typical roller coaster does, which matches my own experience: typical roller coasters jerk you around.
Eh, some coasters have high jerk, some don’t. If anything, the trend seems to be to less jerk nowadays. You really can’t beat the old wooden coasters for jerk.
Not so long ago (no cite) the commander of the IDF Air Force flew in a (nominal?) combat mission, for macho/support the troops/shits and giggles/who knows why, and caught all sorts of hell for it.
I’m going to bet Melbourne meant “jerk” in the general sense of random movements in all directions; violent vibrations. With the “all directions” part being the important factor.
Whereas I bet that Chronos is taking about “jerk” the physics term for the rate of change of acceleration.
They’re related, since high physics jerk values will feel like particularly violent changes of direction. But high physics jerk all in one plane of motion will feel less distressing than low physics jerk random motion in 3 dimensions.