As deep sleep transitions into a tranquil dream state, I have no idea I am not at home safe in my bed, but slumped, unconscious over the controls of a Russian fighter jet. I am in a steep dive approaching the sound barrier with only seconds left before impact with the ground
Three weeks earlier I was as unlikely as any normal Canadian of being in this predicament. I am not in the military, I’m not even a licenced pilot. Aside from an interest in travel and flying I was just a regular person with a regular job living in Toronto. While planning a vacation with my wife to Moscow I came across an unusual Russian website. It was at that point my regular life became something more.
Fly Russian military jets no experience needed, the web site claimed, Includes transfer from your hotel in Moscow. My fascination with flying has rewarded me with some time with an instructor behind the controls of a variety of aircraft, even aerobatics a couple of times, but nothing like this.
My excitement was short lived after finding people on the internet warning of scams and lost money on bank transfers to Russia. I thought how stupid I was for almost falling for something so outrageous but my desire to believe would not be satisfied until I at least sent an email. I will be coming to Moscow in 3 weeks, can I book and pay when I get there? is all I wrote, not expecting a reply. The next day I got an equally short email back. $800.00 USD cash and a Moscow phone number.
Before I knew it my wife and I were near the end of our trip to Moscow. We had visited all the main tourist sites and were left with a day and a half of free time before our flight home. I had been thinking about the email a lot and even brought $800.00 in cash that I had stashed away in a suitcase. No longer able to control my curiosity I dialed the number from the email. A man with a thick Russian accent answered. I explained who I was and asked if it was possible to fly tomorrow. I was put on hold for several minutes before he finally came back on the phone. “Yes, you can fly tomorrow” he said, “meet me in front of the Lenengrad Library in 2 hours with the money, I will be wearing a blue suit”. I smiled as I hung the phone up, I felt like I was in a spy movie. I had to at least check it out.
Sure enough when we got to the library a man in a blue suit was hanging out in front. I approached him and introduced myself. “Follow me” he said as he began to walk away. We walked a couple of blocks to a small cluttered office, filing cabinets, and papers piled everywhere. Photos of Russian military jets plastered the walls. “Did you bring the money?” he asked as he sat behind a cluttered desk. If indeed it was a scam at least I knew where his office is so I set the cash on the desk. After a short conversation he said “I will send a car to your hotel tomorrow at 8:00am”.
The next morning I gave my wife one last kiss goodbye and headed down to the hotel lobby at 7:45am. The only car around was a black Mercedes with dark tinted windows. As I walked up the driver rolled down his window a crack and said “Lister?”. “Yes” I responded and climbed into the back seat. “Where are we going” I asked. “No English” he replied as he pulled away.
I watched through the window as we left the city and headed out into the country side. My imagination ran wild, I started to think about where he might be taking me. Unable to come up with a valid reason he might want to kill me, I convinced myself I was indeed going to fly a jet and tried to focus on my previous training and getting mentally prepared.
When flying acrobatics or anything that involves speed and change of direction, the invisible gravity like force felt is called G force. I am cursed with getting severe motion sickness and remembered how debilitating the nausea from G force can be. Nothing has helped in the past but this time I had taken a new prescription.
3 hours went by before we pulled off the main road and were soon at the security gate of a military airport. A tense conversation in Russian persued between the driver and the guard. Finally the gate opened, as we drove through I had the feeling this might not be legal.
I didn’t get much time to think about it before the car stopped in front of a 3 story office building. I was taken inside to a classroom where 20 young Russian pilots in flight suits were in the middle of a lesson. The instructor noticed me right away and seemed to stop mid sentence and dismissed his students. I started thinking I was in over my head? Could I be arrested? Here I am standing inside a restricted military base somewhere in Russia about to fly off in a fighter jet all paid with cash I gave to a man I met on the street. The instructor introduced himself and I forgot his name the second after he said it.
I was told to sit down at one of the desks and he explained what was going to happen. “I will do each maneuver first to show you” he said “then you will repeat the maneuver”. He went on to describe the maneuvers and I was able to relax a little. My previous knowledge of flying enabled me to fill in the pieces lost in his English.
After an hour in the classroom I was given a flight suit and taken outside to the ejection simulator. The simulator was a mock up of the cockpit of a jet. The seat inside was hooked up to large compressed air tanks and attached to a long rail extending about 15 feet straight up. I was strapped in tightly. “When I give you the order, you pull the ejection handle” he said. I remembered learning about this before. It’s called “punching out” and for a good reason. “Eject..Eject..Eject” he yelled and I pulled the handle. In one violent microsecond I was at the top of the rail.
With my body shaking from the human bullet ride and my brain swimming in new unprocessed information we headed to the tarmac. Ten L-39 fighter jets in a row brought childhood memories of plastic models and pretending. Today it’s for real.
Fighter number 3 was to be my ride. I climbed up into the rear seat while my instructor climbed into the front and disappearing from view behind the high seat back. My seat was a little higher then his so I had a good view forward. As the ground crew strapped us in I tried to take in all the controls and gauges. Everything was an exact duplication of what the instructor had up front. He had emphasized in the classroom to keep clear of the stick and pedals when he was flying.
Helmets on, it was time for a quick radio check, “David, can you hear me” he said. The volume of his voice so loud it felt like my ear drums had been stabbed. “Yes, I hear you” I replied . The engines started and the clear canopy lowered and locked into position giving me a fishbowl view of the outside. The ground crew cleared and we taxied to the runway. At the end of the runway we came to a stop and the engine was throttled up. The raw power began shaking the aircraft. When the wheel brakes came off I became embedded in my seat from the acceleration and we were soon airborne. “Are you OK?” he asked over the radio. The noise of the engines was so loud the volume of the radio didn’t bother me anymore. “Yes” I replied.
We reached cruising altitude quickly and were on route to an area 5 minutes away to do the maneuvers. “You have the aircraft” he said over the radio. This was it, my turn to fly. I placed my feet on the rudder pedals and grabbed the control stick in a death grip with my right hand. “I have the aircraft” I said proudly and he took his hands and feet off the controls. Smooth flight came to an abrupt end as the aircraft rolled and pitched from my constant over corrections. Remembering what I had been taught, I took a deep breath and used just my thumb and index finger to hold the stick. The aircraft began to settle down and by the time we got to the maneuvers area I was flying straight and level.
“Good flying” said the instructors voice over the radio, “Now give me the aircraft” his hands and feet now back on the controls. “You have the aircraft” I replied letting him know I was clear. “First we will do a loop” he said and pulled back on the stick while explaining what he was doing. I felt the familiar feeling of the G force increasing and tensed all my muscles to fight it. My body became heavy and my head was pushed down between my shoulder blades but something was different. No motion sickness, I felt great. Half way through the loop, upside down, and hanging by the seat belts, for the first time I was able to fully take in the experience without the overwhelming feeling of nausea. Once level again it was my turn. I was able to fly a perfect loop, at least in my opinion. “Very good” he said over the radio.
Over the next 15 minutes crushing G force replaced gravity and the definition of up and down. The ground rolled and spun around the aircraft, at times I would lose track of it then find it a moment later in a surprising direction and angle. One by one I completed every maneuver becoming more aggressive and confident after each one. I could wrestle the aircraft into doing just what I wanted it do. Confidence turned to over confidence. I was indestructible.
“Good job, we are finished early” the instructor said “we have time for 1 more maneuver”. I was exhausted, my flight suite soaked with sweat but I had to finish with something challenging. How fast can I go? I thought. “I’m going to do a loop again” I finally replied.
Starting with lots of altitude I did the first half of the loop as before but while upside down at the top I stayed parallel to the ground for a few moments to build up my air speed. I reduced the throttle from full to two thirds as a token to the instructor that I knew I had to reduce thrust, and ever so slowly began pointing the jet towards the ground. Speed and G force built rapidly. I expected him to tell me to slow down but the radio remained silent.
Now three quarters of the way through the loop I was pointing straight at the ground, it was difficult to keep pulling up. At 6Gs my body now weighed over 1000lbs. It felt like someone was standing on top of my head, the pours of my skin were bleeding sweat. Approaching 7Gs I realized that by combining gravity and thrust, I had created a monster. Fear finally convinced me to cut the throttle back, but first, how fast am I going? I glance down trying to locate the airspeed indicator and………………………
The symptoms before a High G blackout are loss of color vision and loss of peripheral vision. I had neither. My blood weighed so much it began to pool in my legs. What was left was so heavy my heart could not pump to my brain and it turned off like a light switch. I am in a death black place some where beyond dream state at the edge of nonexistence. I have no thoughts, no memory and feel nothing. Time stops.
As blood begins to slowly return to my brain I begin to exist again. I find myself at the infancy of a dream in a peaceful place with a complete absence of light. The only thing with me is a faint far off noise. As the dream progresses and the noise becomes louder, peace is gradually replaced with anxiety and the dream turns to a nightmare. Slowly the nightmare turns real. I desperately try to figure out what is happening to me but my memory only goes back to the beginning of the dream and the death black wall of nonexistence. Again and again I franticly go over it, creating a memory trail between consciousness and nonexistence that I would be able to recall the rest of my life.
The noise is now deafening. It feels like I’m in a train wreck, but I have no memory of getting on a train. Completely awake now but still blind and confused I realize I am being crushed to death. I have to fight back now or die. With every ounce of life I push out with my arms and legs against the crushing force.
Suddenly my full vision returns and with it my memory is instantly restored. The crushing feeling is gone. Wings level, the bright sun providing a heavenly view of the detailed country side below me. In an instant I had gone from confusion, darkness and dying to peace, light and beauty. At the same time my vision came back what was just noise before suddenly had depth and pitch. “David!…………David!…………David!” my instructor was yelling in the radio. “I’m OK” I replied. I knew I had blacked out from the G force, luckily my instructor had stayed conscious and pulled out of the dive before we hit the ground.
My arm was still extended from seconds ago when I thought I was fighting for my life, my hand was on the ejection handle an inch away from firing both of us out into limb tearing wind speeds. My feet had come off the rudder pedals and had been pushing against the floor. Had they been still on the pedals I could have created another monster that even a military instructor couldn’t defeat.
On the short flight back to base there was an awkward radio silence. Neither one of us would talk about what just happened. I thought about how lucky I was not only to be alive but for the unique experiences giving me an extraordinary insight of life and the danger and thrill of being a test pilot.
Dave Lister
listerlogic.com
