Flight School: An Assignment You Can't Refuse

ELGIN AIR FORCE BASE, Florida, Feb. 16, 2008 — -- I was at peace with the idea of my first ride on a fighter jet. Actually, I was a little excited … until the public affairs officer at Eglin Air Force Base casually mentioned over the phone that as long as I liked roller coasters I'd have no problem in an F-16.

I hate roller coasters.

Yet there I was one recent Monday morning at the Medical Center at Eglin Air Force Base, near Pensacola, Fla., perched on the end of an examining bed as my ears and throat were probed by flight surgeon Maj. Bob Mishra, also known as "Hittin."

Hittin's pep talk did not begin well.

"More than half the people get sick," Hittin told me in a disarmingly clinical voice. "Just make sure you get a couple of airsickness bags." He couldn't resist a little flourish.

"These bags are made by the lowest bidder, so you want to get two of them."

Thanks, Doc.

"And you want to double-bag it and you want to put it somewhere where you can get it," he added. "What you want to do is you want to be sure you know how to drop the oxygen mask and you can grab that bag and use it if you have to."

Dropping the clinical veneer for just a moment, he added, "We hope that you don't ever have to."

That made two of us.

So began a very long day of intense preflight training. I remember being fascinated, excited and occasionally a bit anxious, but mostly I remember being overwhelmed as information was hurled at me faster than, well, Mach 1.2, the speed at which I would be traveling shortly after sunrise the next morning.

"You are going to notice there is a big vent that is going to be blasting cold air into the jet," said Hittin as he listed the things I could do to avoid — or try to avoid — puking at the speed of sound. "So what you can do is turn that thing on and try to get it on to your face. The cold air on your face will help you feel better."

So would keeping my eyes out of the cockpit and on the horizon. So would a swig of water. Finally, he counseled pure oxygen, urging me to listen carefully when my instructor showed me how to switch my oxygen regulator to 100 percent.

"When you get some nice clean clear oxygen in your lungs that will make you feel better as well."

But then we got back to where we began. "If all else fails you are going to have a barf bag handy."

But then I learned that the real demon in all this is gravitational force, or as they like to call it here, G force.

"Now the way that G forces work is pretty simple," said Hittin as he began a high school physics lesson. "If you think about tying a rock to a string and swinging it around — you are the rock."

Uh, right.

"And if you can think of yourself sitting down while that force is going on, what is happening is centrifugal force is pushing the blood from here [pointing to his head] down [he points to his legs] and if you don't have enough blood here [head] you can pass out and lose consciousness."

He then told me how the anti-gravity G suit I'd be wearing would inflate to push the blood back up from legs. And how I needed to clench my leg and stomach muscles to give it a little help. And how I needed to do some fast, shallow breathing.

He made it sound so simple.

Then with the stroke of a pen he signed a piece of paper: my 10-42, Air Force lingo for a medical clearance form.

I was not even airborne and I was starting to lose consciousness as I strained to retain all the information being thrown at me. Little did I know, this was just the beginning.

In another building on the sprawling base I was ushered into a room called Life Support. It's a concept I wholly endorsed, although I was not yet sure what it meant. Inside Life Support I met "Fig," aka Master Sgt. Mikel Figuero, my enthusiastic instructor. Fig would spend several hours showing me all the perils of a fighter jet ride and the easy-as-pie, 1-zillion-step process I would have to follow to make sure none of those perils made me perish.