Word: brett
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...minutes out of Langley, our Super Sabre whooshed over Virginia's Dismal Swamp to the cirrus-dappled air over North Carolina's Chowan River. This area was set aside for acrobatics, cleared of other aircraft. In the Super Sabre, Brett could have wafted into weightlessness by flying high and level, faster than sound, and pushing the plane's nose up into the Keplerian trajectory, in which centrifugal force exactly cancels the earth's gravitational pull. Despite his plane's vast speed reserve, he chose to work at lower altitudes, enter the parabola from a power...
...over too soon. Pilot Brett had been too busy with his controls and indicators, and I had been too bemused by the otherworldliness of the phenomenon, to time our first excursion into weightlessness. Colonel Brett pulled up the nose again, regained altitude, and within a minute or so was asking: "Ready to try it again?" Down we dived and up into another pullout. Up went the g needle. I felt a crushing force, and then the ineffable relief of subgravity and the euphoria of zero gravity. This time it lasted longer. Again I toyed with the stringless yoyo, so delightedly...
...speeds, we repeated the maneuver 18 times in little more than an hour's flying. The 4-g phase was miserable for me, unaccustomed to it, and I felt befuddled for a few seconds after each pullout. As we homed to Langley (going supersonic on the way), Brett told me that he had felt as clearheaded during weightlessness as in any other acrobatic flight, had never for an instant forgotten his oil-pressure gauge, which might easily have dipped dangerously low in these maneuvers. His clearheadedness showed that training can make a big difference...
...31st and last parabolic curve of the morning, Brett approached Veteran Stallings' record of 43 seconds: he maintained a state of negligible gravity for 40 seconds, of which I would testify that 27 seconds were true zero gravity. As closely as Brett and I could figure, we had floated virtually weightless for seven minutes and in true zero gravity for five. From our two-man, 2½-hour survey, we could obviously not make even tentative assumptions about possibly grave long-term effects (over days, weeks or months) of weightlessness on the human circulatory and respiratory systems. But these...
...Plus 2=What? Now that Pilot Brett had the feel of it, we tried some experiments. With the plane refueled, we headed back to the acrobatic area. Brett's usual rear-seat man, ist Lieut. Arthur Brattkus, had prepared a mental-alertness test for me during our coffee break. On the back pages of a scratch pad he had written three elementary problems in arithmetic. These represented a mild foretaste of what a space pilot might have to do in the weightless state. Would my gravity-free brain be clear enough to solve them...