On our Trip to Laughlin AFB, Rick Ladomade and I got to fly backseat in the T-38C for about an hour. It was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life and I hope that this could be the first of many such flights.
All of the photos in this gallery are by Tejay Beauparlant. This is one of only two galleries of photos by someone other than myself (the other being "FO Trip Images by Tejay Beauparlant"). Since it wasn't possible to take photos of myself during the preperation and actual flight, I had to rely on Tejay for the photography. All of these photos are his and and should not be used by anyone without his permission.
Here is a write up of the flight. The text below is cross-posted from the fighterops forums:
After strapping into the jet Lt Col Prakash had me attempt to lower the canopy to see if it would close. It wouldn't no matter how hard I tried. Lt Col Prakash stood on the ladder next to me and for several minutes we tried to get it out of its opened and locked state. Finally we got the canopy to come down. He got into the jet and a few minutes later we started our taxi. The base was pretty busy and we had to wait at the hold line short of the runway for over 5 minutes before we were able to takeoff.
Probably 10-20 seconds after the gear was raised Lt Col Prakash and Maj Parker pulled the jet into a steep climb and away we went. It was nice being able to see Laughlin pull away behind us so quickly. I'm not sure of the altitude that we leveled off at (I believe it was between 16 and 18 thousand feet).
After a few minutes of flight we started into a continuous 30 sec 5+G turn. A few seconds into the turn I remembered that I needed to start doing the anti G straining maneuver. For me the AGSM stuff was something I had to think about doing. Since this was a first flight for me in a military jet it wasn't an automatic and unconscious thing. The turn itself was easy enough and I didn't have any problems.
Sometime after that Lt Col Prakash asked if I wanted to fly. Of course I wanted to. He took his hands off the stick and throttle and I started flying the jet. While I knew that I would ultimately get to manipulate the stick on the flight I didn't know that he would hand off the throttle to me as well. For the next 15 minutes I got to do some formation flying (following behind and to the right of Parker's/Rick's aircraft about 100 yards out), aileron rolls, a few quick G turns, four low yo-yos, and a few other things. Lt Col Prakash complimented me for having a very good understanding and feel for 3 dimensional space.
Control was then returned to Lt Col Prakash. I told Lt Col Prakash to go ahead and take it easy for a few minutes as I needed a break. For a minute or two I started feeling a little queasy but it passed fairly quickly (it was during this time that Lt Col Prakash asked if I wanted to take control of the jet again - for a few reasons I declined and assumed I would have another chance later. Unfortunately it didn't work out that way). I believe that it was during this period that Rick was doing most of the flying in the other aircraft but I'm not sure. Lt Col Prakash and I got to talking about a number of subjects related to flight sims and college.
Then out of nowhere he asked if I wanted to do a loop. I said "sure, sounds great." He nosed down and picked up some speed and immediately pulled into the loop. I became complacent and didn't do the AGSM stuff at all. It never crossed my mind. Near the top of the loop I went into GLOC for a few seconds. I do not believe that Lt Col Prakash ever knew I GLOC'd (he never mentioned it or hinted at it). I was surprised at the GLOC since we had done higher G loads for longer sustained periods earlier in the day and I hadn't had any problems at all. The difference was that I made a concerted effort to stay out of GLOC through AGSM earlier in the day while in the loop I did not.
Shortly afterword we started our descent for landing.
It ended up being a great flight and I'm glad to have had a chance to have done it.
