Breaking Barriers, in Particular the Sound Barrier

Jim Clash and pilot “Bulldog,” canopy down, ready to taxi for their supersonic F-16 flight. (Photos by Art Harmon)

At Eglin AFB near Destin, Florida, there are five two-seat F-16s used as trainers for burgeoning pilots. I was privileged enough to ride in the back of one last December.

Mind you, I’d been in an F-16 before a few years back, out of Eielson AFB in Fairbanks, Alaska, but it was in uncomfortable cold-weather gear. The extra clothing was protection if, say, we needed to eject over the arctic and survive until a rescue party could find us. The Eglin flight, given the gentle Florida clime, would only require a standard flight suit, G-pants, helmet, and oxygen mask.

Still, anytime one flies supersonic (above Mach 1) in a fighter jet is serious business. The week started with a requisite physical exam at the base. Then it was on to intensive parachute, physiologic, and egress training, the parachute part in a hanging harness and the bailout part in a mock ejection seat.

Ejection is a last-ditch maneuver, of course, as you will pull up to 20 Gs (20 times your body weight) in under two seconds, not to mention the loss of tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars when the plane hits the ground. While my pilot, Col. Alec “Bulldog” Spencer, a 45-year-old with 2,300 hours in the F-16, and I were to be under the same canopy cockpit glass—he in front, me directly behind—we each had command of our own ejection seat.

The flight was scheduled for Dec. 5 but, due to maintenance issues, was pushed back to Dec. 9. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either good or bad. On one hand, I had been lucky in not having a mishap the seven times I’d flown supersonic in other fighter jets. That’s probably some kind of Guinness record for a non-pilot. Viewed another way, how statisticians look at it, the luck factor is misleading. The longer you do something risky, the more the odds stack up against you. Since 2010, 43 F-16s have required bailouts, resulting in eight fatalities.

As a kid growing up in Laurel, I used to build model aircraft. One was the Bell X-1, the plane Chuck Yeager took supersonic in 1947, the first time a human had ever done so. I remember thinking what that might be like, fantasizing about it. The space race with the former Soviet Union had captivated us all, including my boyhood friends in Laurel. Many wanted to become astronauts and test pilots. Now, about to go supersonic for the seventh time myself—well, I had to pinch myself. I didn’t become an astronaut or test pilot, but breaking the sound barrier over and over was almost as good.

The morning of the 5th dawned with iffy weather. My flight was to be part of a larger war-games exercise involving other aircraft. Four F-15s were to chase down our plane to see if—and how long it might take—to destroy us electronically, then move on to their bombing targets. Because of the complexity of the mission, tactical testing of new weapons, and things like wind speed and direction, cloud cover and precipitation might have scrapped it. That didn’t happen, so we suited up and made our way to the flight-line for an 8 a.m. takeoff.

Once strapped into the plane, it was a long taxi out to the runway. Along the way, with Bulldog’s verbal okay via a radio installed in my helmet, I armed my ejection seat by pulling down a yellow-striped lever near my left leg. The takeoff was uneventful, and without afterburners. One objective was to run the plane up to Mach 1.6, the two-seater limit, and to achieve that meant saving as much fuel as possible. We gradually made our way up above 40,000 feet, through two layers of clouds.

While waiting for the F-15s, Bulldog asked if I wanted to fly the plane. Sheepishly, I placed my hand on the computerized control stick near my right leg. A slight pull to the left jerked the plane left of horizontal. A slight push to the right moved it in that direction. A pull back put us into a climb, and a push forward (that one I skipped) pointed the plane’s nose toward the ground. The aircraft was incredibly responsive, like an Indy car at high speed.

Bulldog took back the stick at 30,000 feet and began to climb and accelerate: Mach 0.9 ... 1.0 ... 1.2 ... 1.4. Eventually, after we had leveled off at 40,000 feet, the aircraft hit Mach 1.6. We were cruising at more than 1,100 mph—the length of six football fields per second!

Once the F-15s had their way with us and moved on to their bombing mission, we had some spare fuel to play with. First, it was a rapid descent to 200 feet above the Gulf of Mexico to conduct some low passes. Cruising at over 600 mph down there, the waves, rushing by frenetically, seemed so close that you could reach out and skim your hand along the top of them. Then we abruptly pulled up to vertical and climbed to 10,000 feet in less than a minute. The Gs on that maneuver got my attention.

After an hour and 10 minutes in the air, we landed back at Eglin. I was stoked but tired, and my ears hurt. When we had reached apogee at 44,000 feet, Bulldog explained at our debrief, the cockpit was pressurized to only 19,000 feet. If not for the oxygen masks, we would have gone hypoxic in a couple of minutes. Bulldog also mentioned that we had been above Mach 1 for about 10 minutes straight, eye-opening in itself.

I left Eglin with a better understanding of just how important the F-16 still is to the U.S. military. While only a fourth-generation fighter, its ongoing evolution after 50 years of service puts its performance close to that of fifth-generation jets like the F-22 and F-35.

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Jim Clash immerses himself in extreme adventures for Forbes magazine. He graduated from Laurel High School in 1973. His latest book is Amplified: Interviews With Icons of Rock ‘n’ Roll.