#VOMIT COMET FULL#

'Everybody will do the first 10 parabolas very giddy,' he said. Shepherd instructed me to watch them as the flight went along. But the engineers weren't as experienced, and Capt. In fact, the parabola profile seemed pretty mild compared to the way a fighter maneuvered during a dogfight. I was a Tomcat Radar Intercept Officer with more than 1,000 tactical jet hours under my belt at the time, so high-G flight was nothing new to me. He'd admitted before the mission that he'd become airsick every time and predicted he'd do so on that day's mission as well. My host Navy Captain Bill Shepherd, a SEAL by warfare specialty who later broke the record for days on the International Space Station, had done the Vomit Comet missions many times. Each cycle was known as a 'parabola,' and a mission consisted of 40 of them – 20 headed eastbound and 20 headed back to the base, westbound. At that point he's start another 1.8 G pull back to 45 degrees nose up into another zero G pushover. At that point he pushed the nose forward until the aircraft was right at zero G and held it there until the aircraft was pointed 45 degrees nose down, which resulted in about 30 seconds of weightlessness. The pilot announced 'starting the pull,' which meant he was commencing a 1.8 G pull until the aircraft's nose was pointed 45 degrees up. He said that passengers had sprained ankles and wrists or twisted neck muscles by getting disoriented while weightless and hitting the deck in an awkward fashion once G came back on the airplane. There was a crew chief who was charged with making sure nobody got hurt, and he explained during his safety brief that the main way to avoid injury was to make sure you had a hand on the padded floor during the transition from zero-G back to 1-G. There were about a dozen passengers in the compartment with me, mostly engineers who were testing exercise equipment for future use on the space station. We launched out of Ellington Field at headed over the Gulf of Mexico. In those days NASA used a couple of KC-135 Stratotankers as the Vomit Comets, which were big ol' beasts relative to the contract Airbus 300s and 727s they used later.

#VOMIT COMET FULL#

Along with suiting up in full astronaut gear and flying the shuttle simulator in all regimes of flight, I had the opportunity to ride in NASA's 'reduced gravity aircraft,' better known as the 'vomit comet' (because of its tendency to cause passengers to throw up during the zero-G missions). Navy lieutenant serving as the editor of Approach magazine (Naval Aviation's Safety review), I was invited by NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd to come down to Houston for a hands-on tour. Way back in the early '90s, when I was a U.S.

Vomit comet