GUT CHECK AT MACH 1

I recently cadged a ride in an F-16 fighter jet, and as a result, I take to this very public stage to grudgingly admit the following: My younger brothers are incredibly manly, studly dudes.

And, as it turns out, the time I spent aloft may even have earned me a measure of respect from Dave and Stu, two very tough critics. Both used to fly in Navy jets for a living--Dave as a fighter pilot, Stu as a bombardier-navigator in low-altitude attack jets.

Me? I write for a newspaper.

While Dave was busy whipping around the skies over the fabled Top Gun fighter training school and Stu was laying bombs on Iraq, I was, you know, keeping America safe for democracy in my own special way. My brothers remained unimpressed.

Can you say, “Slacker civilian”?

Can you say, “Liberal media windbag”?

Needless to say, family reunions were a very merry experience. Typically at my expense. Can you say, “Draft dodger”?

For the record, I did not dodge the draft. By the time I graduated from high school, in 1976, the draft was over. The Vietnam War had ended the year before, and no one in his right mind willingly signed up for ROTC--which is what my brothers went on to do as a way of paying for college. The old man’s rule was that we each had to pay for college ourselves.

Dave, the first one through the Navy pipeline, served primarily as an F-14 pilot; from 1989 to 1992, at the end of his Navy career, he flew the F-16 as an opposition pilot at Top Gun. Stu, meantime, is now a decorated war hero. He was a bombardier-navigator in the A-6 Intruder, the carrier-based low-level bomber, and flew 43 combat missions in the Gulf War. (Youngest brother Scott, who had no burning ambition to fly, also went Navy ROTC and served five years as a shipboard officer.)

Never did I have a burning ambition to fly. But I yearned to go up--just once.

In 1991, I did get to spend four days with Stu aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt as the carrier steamed home to Virginia from the Gulf War. Several hundred other civilian relatives also joined the ship in Bermuda; for the next four days, we bunked in Navy staterooms and ate Navy chow. The undisputed highlight of the trip, however, was an air show put on for the benefit of us taxpayers. The F-14s shot off the carrier deck, afterburners roaring. A few minutes later, the fighters came back around and went supersonic amidship--no need to worry at sea about the boom scaring a few old ladies. Even more exciting, a few minutes later, was getting to go to the area at the aft of the ship where crews were waving the planes down for landing. Wings waggling, engines screaming, the F-14s and A-6s passed just over my head as they smacked onto the carrier deck and caught a cable, lurching to a stop.

When we got to Virginia, we were met by a crowd of thousands. Many of the wives and girlfriends, it was later recounted, managed to get dressed that day without underwear. Apparently, this is the impact aviators have on the opposite sex.

In my four days in the Navy, as I often refer to that trip, Stu dressed me up in a helmet, flight suit and harness and sat me down in the A-6 cockpit for a full briefing on its navigation and bomb systems. But I didn’t get to fly. Perhaps this is why my wife, God bless her, was fully dressed that day on the dock in Virginia.

Since then, some of Dave’s friends have become pilots in the Blue Angels, the Navy’s aerial demonstration troupe, but my life nevertheless remained a no-fly zone. And then, two months ago, I got a call--but not from the Navy. Instead, it was from a contact at Los Angeles Air Force Base, asking whether I was interested in an F-16 ride at Edwards Air Force Base, offered as a promotional preparation for the base’s annual open house.

I leaped at the opportunity.

The stakes quickly grew intense. If I barfed, it was clear I would hear about it for, oh, only the next 40 or so years.

Stu, who fancies himself a comic, was only too glad to offer several preflight tips:

“Don’t touch the ejection handle.”

And: “Every 10 minutes, say to the pilot, ‘Hey, that’s not how they do it in the Navy.’ And on the landing, say, ‘A carrier landing is more difficult than that.’ ”

And, finally: “Eat bananas. They taste the same coming up as they do going down.”

On the appointed day, as I explained the situation to Terry Tomeny, the former Air Force test pilot who would be flying me, he volunteered his own advice. “If you’re going to puke,” he said, “please flip off the hot mike,” an otherwise always-on two-way microphone between the front and back seats. “I’m a sympathetic barfer.”

Tomeny immediately grasped the family dynamics. So he prepared a flight plan that would enable me to reclaim my rightful station at family events. After lifting the nose off the ground and skimming over the fantastically long runway at Edwards for a few seconds, Tomeny inquired, “Ready?”

From the back seat, I replied, “Yep,” and the afterburner began kicking in. He pointed the plane up and, bam!

My helmeted head whacked back against the seat. I completely lost all orientation to ground and sky as the G-suit began filling with air, pressing against my legs and abdomen in a bid to force blood out of my midsection and back to my brain.

I blinked, trying to clear my head. That fast, we were at 18,000 feet and leveling off.

“Well, what do you think?” Tomeny asked, calm and cool.

“Incredible,” I said, trying to focus.

For the next hour, it was one mind-bending, gut-churning feeling after another. He let me take the plane’s controls, and I banked it to the left, then to the right. He took back the stick, and we dived down to 400 feet off the ground and roared along at about 500 mph, the ground zipping along like the scenery in a video game. He segued into a terrain-hugging low-level bombing run and, a few moments later, performed a 40-degree simulated bombing dive from 18,000 feet. We flew Mach 1.1--but, frankly, I didn’t hear a boom and it didn’t feel any different from subsonic flight.

We did loops. We did rolls. Where was the ground? Where was the sky? Several times I literally had no idea which way was up. My only link to reality was a sun-baked bubble canopy. And then that disappeared when we pulled a 9-G turn. As Tomeny calmly called off the increasing G-forces--”. . . 5, 6, 7, 8, 8.1, 8.2 . . . “--I could feel, just as he had predicted in our preflight briefing, the onset of tunnel vision, my world closing in, everything going gray.

And then the turn was over and I could see fuzzy shapes. My head still felt as if it weighed 10,000 pounds, but my vision was slowly coming back and, yes, there, I recognized the cockpit and the canopy and I was very much alive. And roaring across the sky in an F-16. Straight and level.

After 75 minutes, Tomeny put the plane down on the ground.

Frankly, I was impressed. With Tomeny. And my brothers. And with all the others who regularly fly military aircraft. Their courage, skill, proficiency and professionalism--often demonstrated under the most taxing physical and emotional conditions--is worthy of salute.

Candidly, I was also marginally impressed with myself. I did not barf.

When I called Stu that night, he spoke to me as if I was a peer. “It’s an incredible feeling, isn’t it?” he said. “You can’t describe it to anybody unless they’ve felt it. The closest you can come is a roller coaster, but that’s not it.”

Of course, Stu was impressed only up to a point. When I reminded him that I now had 1.3 hours in an F-16, including a few minutes at the controls, he asked, “How many hours you have in naval airplanes?”

Dave, however, was genuinely impressed. Even better, he was momentarily jealous. My brother, with 325 carrier landings and thousands of hours in military jets, said: “I’m envious, man. I haven’t flown a 16 in seven years now, seven and a half.”

He paused, then recounted his last flight in an F-16, down to the date (March 31, 1992), whom he flew with (a buddy whose call sign was “Juice”) and what they did (a simple mission over the Pacific before returning to San Diego and Miramar Naval Air Station, where Top Gun was based at the time).

“I guess because I was the senior [flier] leading the flight back in, I had San Diego spread out in front of me, and I thought to myself, ‘I’ve been taking this view for granted, and I’m really gonna miss it.’ It really is awesome. It’s the best view you’ll ever have in an airplane.”

I agree. The view from a cockpit is sensational.

Now if I can only cadge a landing on one of those aircraft carriers . . . .