FEELING THE FORCES OF A FIGHTER JET - Smarter Every Day 159
Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day! I used to wear glasses; I don't know if you knew that about me, but I was a nearsighted guy until I got the surgery. This is what kept me from being a fighter pilot in the Air Force. I had the scholarship, but I couldn't pass the pilot physical to fly fighter jets. It really let me down.
I love flight, though! I have studied flight my entire life. In fact, I went on to get a master's degree in aerospace engineering. Can you begin to imagine the excitement I felt when I got the call from the 560th Flying Training Squadron at Randolph Air Force Base, who asked me if I wanted an orientation flight in a T-38? If you don't know what a T-38 is, that is the supersonic trainer for both the Air Force and NASA, and it is awesome!
I understand that I can't help you experience the accelerations of a fighter jet through internet video; we just don't have that technology. What I can do is I can play a music video that communicates the excitement of 14-year-old wannabe fire pilot Destin and contrast that with aerospace engineer Destin, who thinks he understands how fighter planes work but gets stumped three times. Three times! Little boy Dustin, engineer Destin—those worlds collide three times in a T-38 cockpit at Randolph Air War Space. Let's go get smarter every day!
[Music]
Medical module steer head—it has pockets where the bladders are. [Music] Gotcha, appreciate that. No, it's good. Lieutenant Colonel Sua-Ricky, am I saying your name right, sir? Hey, let's do it! Getting airborne with a we like to—or not? Right now sounds good to me!
It was way smoother than I—[Music]—I sent them up to about a mile line of breath head over each other. Holy cow! Oh man, that's awesome! So, you call these lazy eights? No, this is just departure, man. All right, here's Jez. [Music] Ready? The awareness? H left. Okay, this is more G's. Ready for G's? Yeah, give me those!
These beeps you hear are called G limit tones, and it's the aircraft warning you that you're approaching an excessive amount of G. We got five that time! Yep, five and a half. We held five for most of it. Okay, that was the first time I had sustained a 5G pull for any significant amount of time, and it is no joke. It is so hard to think!
Remember those fancy pants that I put on at the beginning of the video? That's called a G-suit, and it keeps your brain from locking up, which is something that could easily lead to a crash. If you're flying along at 500 knots, you see blood is a fluid, so when you pull back on the stick and put your body in a high-G environment, all the blood starts to pull down into your legs. Your heart can't get enough oxygenated blood back up to your brain, so something called stagnant hypoxia happens. You remember hypoxia, right? Yeah, it's a big deal, which is why fighter pilots wear G-suits.
Depending on the amount of G's that a supersonic takes, it'll blow your bladders up and put pressure on your extremities to push the blood up to your brain. That's why they spend so much time lacing up your G-suit and getting it tight. The G-suit, coupled with that special breathing technique you heard, helps keep fresh oxygen flowing up to your brain, so you avoid G-lock.
Okay, now that Supa knows I can handle G's, let's move on to simple 3D maneuvers. Okay, we haven't gone upside down yet today; you want to do it real quick? Yeah, let's do it. All right, you have the aircraft. I have the aircraft. Let's go full Aeron left and just do one roll around. Here we go! Ready? Faster, faster, hard! There you go! Woo! Wow, that's fast! It's quick, right? Can I go right? Yeah. [Music] Where do you focus when you do that? Straight ahead?
Yeah, we're going to do what's called a cloverleaf. It's going to go up about 45°. Look out to your right, out on the horizon. There we go! Zero-G. There's upside down about seven or so now, coming down this side. Now, as our airspeed increases because we're pointing straight down, I got all sorts of G available, but I won— I don't want to buff it too much because then it eats up all my energy.
It's amazing; we're going to do a loop. Do you want me just to pull back? We're going to do a loop? Yep! Ready for the aircraft? Yep! You have the aircraft. Just leave it pointing right here. Ready? And let's go ahead and pull straight. You're pulling at an angle a little bit. Straight right there, a little bit harder. A little bit harder! Harder, harder, harder, harder, harder, harder! Keep pulling! Keep pulling! Keep pulling! I'll help you out too hard! Keep pulling! Keep pulling! Keep pulling! Keep pulling! Keep pulling! Okay, keep pulling! A little, little bit more. Buff it! A little bit more! Buff it! There you go!
It's amazing; you can roll out of this, couldn't you? Gain altitude? You could, but let's keep going! Let's keep going straight! Look at that horizon! Let's roll a little bit this way. Okay, you got it coming down. Yep, keep pulling a little bit harder. There's going to be a little bit of muffet; keep going straight, straight, straight! Now right here, look straight out ahead of you! Like, look up at the horizon and just pull straight at that! Got it? Okay, that makes sense. You can level up! Yep! How's that feel? Feels good once I know what to index on. Yep, okay!
Believe it or not, one of the simplest maneuvers ended up teaching me the most about flight control systems. Think about this: a loop up and over, right? To do a loop, you simply pull back on the stick; you get more G's, but you just keep pulling—no big deal. I couldn't do it! A little bit harder, a little bit harder, harder, harder, harder, harder, harder! Keep pulling! Keep pulling! Keep pulling!
I'll help you out—the harder I pulled the stick, the harder it pulled against me, which I didn't understand because they were hydraulics between the stick and the surfaces on the wings. So everything I feel here at the stick is just the result of springs and weights inside the stick. As a matter of fact, there's a weight called a bob weight that's forward of the stick under the floor panel, and it's really cool. The more I pull the stick back, the more G's I get, the more G I get, the heavier the bob weight forward of the stick in the floorboard gets. The heavier it gets, the more it tries to self-correct the stick and save me from accidentally passing out from over-G-ing myself. It's genius!
Another thing about that, though, is this is a really complicated control system. It has four main variables: it's the position of the stick, the amount of force I'm applying to the stick, the aerodynamics, or the vector that the aircraft is going, and the G-loading in the aircraft. My brain was constantly trying to solve that control loop, and I did a pretty poor job of it.
The last thing that I had a really hard time wrapping my head around was formation flight. All right, you want to try flying on his wing? I can try. Okay, why don't you just come and match me on the controls a little bit? I'm matching. Okay, all right, ready? Yeah, you have the aircraft. Well, yeah, I was really bad at this. I think I was just scared. I knew I could go away from the aircraft and get into a safer position, but the thought of going closer to the aircraft and just coming over on it blew my mind! Could not handle that.
When Supa took me back to fighting wing, I was able to control it a lot easier, and I was able to follow through a three-dimensional turn. Okay, so here's fighting wing. Try hanging out in this position. Now you can make a little bit bigger corrections. See out here? You're hanging just fine. [Music] Right? I'm head to dirt. Yeah, 'cause it looks like he's getting further away from us; it's 'cause his nose got down to the horizon before ours, so he started speeding up a little bit before [Music] us.
All right, I have the aircraft; you have the aircraft. See him on the right? [Music] Wow, [Music] nice! That one worked out! Okay! [Music] Flare it out! Flare it out! Flare it out! Flare it out! That was amazing!
Before I say thank you to the 560th Flying Training Squadron and introduce you to the other pilots of the other aircraft, I want to do a really quick honest advertisement. You know how I do these on Smarter Every Day? I don't sugarcoat or oversell things; I just tell you stuff that'll be good for your life, and you can either do it or not—no big deal! But this one's really, really good.
Audible.com/smarter is where you can get a free trial for any book you want, but this is the book you want. It’s called "Skunk Works," and it's about the development of the stealth fighter and my favorite aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird. I used to work at a place that built the jet fuel pump for the SR-71, and they had no idea what they were working on. I knew why after I read this book, 'cause all this used to be classified, and now it's not! Audible.com/smarter—that's how they know you came from Smarter Every Day, that's how I'll get the credit for it—but I just want you to listen to this book. It's a really good book! "Skunk Works." I listen to audiobooks; you should listen to audiobooks too! It makes you smarter!
Last thing I want to do is introduce you to the pilots of the other aircraft who gave us a really good experience because if you think about it, we had a visual reference the whole flight, which is something we wouldn't have had otherwise. Okay, that was amazing! We're going to say thank you to Eric, Dax, Puck, which is Clayton, right? Yes, all right! And of course, Lieutenant Colonel Super Freaky. That's it! Thank you very much, gentlemen. I'm Destin; you get smarter every day! Have a good one—thank you! Awesome, that was good! That's it!
[Laughter] Sweet! If you want to be a fighter pilot, you can do that even if your eyes are messed up! That's what's so cool about this episode. I couldn't be a fighter pilot because my eyes were trash at the time, but you can get your eyes corrected! If you're young and you want to fly fighter jets, if you feel like this episode earned your subscription, you can click this box that I'm in right now, which is now turning into a loop simulation.
The first loop is what I thought I was flying—a perfect circular loop with tangent level flight on the bottom. I wasn't even close! When we plotted it, it turns out that the loop is more elongated vertically! When I ask around, pilots tell me that's because of what they call "god's G," which is pulling you straight down, and it tends to elongate that loop vertically. This is also called a clothoid spiral, which is, I think, how you pronounce that word. I couldn't find a proper pronunciation for it anywhere.