Soon I was at forty-five thousand feet, and I began to shallow my climb to arrive at the fifty-thousand-foot service ceiling. I then began a climb, and within seconds, thirty-five thousand feet went by as I continued to accelerate. I quickly accelerated past Mach 1-the speed of sound that Chuck Yeager famously broke in his Bell X-1. I could feel the surge in thrust as it pinned me to the back of my seat. This fuel, however, wasn’t fed into the engine but rather, like a flamethrower, injected directly into my exhaust and ignited, creating a thirty-foot flame out the back of my aircraft. This activated all the boost pumps in the fuel system, which began pulling fuel at a rate that could empty a swimming pool in minutes. To enable it, I rotated the throttle outward, allowing me to push it along a separate track. Fighter aircraft, though, have an additional power source called afterburner. I was at twenty-five thousand feet when I pushed the throttle forward until it hit the stop-this was full power from the turbofan. If you look at an F-16 from the side, you can see that it’s all engine-the structure is built around it, with the pilot sitting atop it at the front.Īfter fifteen minutes, I had finished all the checks except the last one: the max speed run. Topped off, I could only carry seven thousand pounds of fuel, which is never enough with the giant engine behind me burning tens of thousands of pounds of fuel per hour. This mission, however, called for me to launch by myself and test the engine at multiple altitudes and power settings, with the final check being a maximum speed run, where I was to push the aircraft to its limit.Īfter I took off, I entered the designated airspace over the ocean and quickly ran through the various engine checks. When we fly, we usually go out as a formation to work on tactics every drop of fuel is used to prepare for combat. In effect, it was a stripped-down hot rod capable of its theoretical maximum speed. It was a clean jet-none of the typical missiles, bombs, targeting pod, or external fuel tanks were loaded. I was stationed in Korea, and there was a jet coming out of maintenance-the engine had been swapped out, and they needed a pilot to ensure it was airworthy. To give you a sense of the speed at which these aircraft can fly, let me share a story from my time in an F-16. It only takes one wrong move for a flight to end in catastrophe, which, unfortunately, has happened often throughout our history. You’re balancing on a razor’s edge of performance, where the success of each flight hinges on the accumulation of thousands of correct decisions. As a fighter pilot, one of the things you get used to is always being seconds away from a fiery death.
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