Any Flight Simulator weenies here?

You can do a lot more than you think you can. Pulling G's like that is very disorienting if you've never done it, even if you HAVE done it, but not recently, it can screw you up. When you do it every week, it becomes like putting your knee down on track- second nature.

I love aerobatics and I have thought about maybe getting more into that if I were ever to wind down motorcycle racing. But there's alot of up front investment with airplane, hangar, etc. Makes racing look cheap!

 

Had the opportunity to do the USAF F16 simulator in Tucson last year when our son graduated from flight training. It was so cool and incredibly realistic flying through the city and surrounding mountains. Needed his help for the takeoff and landings though.

Definitely got me thinking of converting our driving sim over to a flying sim.

Back in the day, I was considering becoming a flight surgeon. During an aerospace medicine course in San Antonio, I got to go up in a T37 with an instructor. Once airborne, he asked me what I wanted him to do on the flight. I figured, correctly, that I would never get another opportunity like it again in my entire life. So I said, "Give me it all!".

Within a second, we were inverted. The horizon was never in the correct orientation after that. Though I didn't throw up, he knew that I was getting close and so finally, after 20 minutes, he levelled off. He explained that he hated the sound of vomitting in his earphones. Then he let me fly for a awhile and showed me how to do an aileron roll. It was frickin awesome. I was completely phyically exhausted after a haf hour. Massive respect for performance pilots.

There were 12 or so of us that got to do the flights. At least 9 got actively sick. I was one of the last to go. My buddy, who came back puking and white as a ghost from his earler flight, had recovered enough by the time my turn came around that I asked him to follow me to the flight line and take a picture of me next to the jet. As soon as he opened the door and heard the whine of the engines, he doubled over and started projectile vomitting again, only stopping long enough to throw my camera at me. Fun times!