THE pilot is counting down over the intercom: “One minute…30 seconds… 20…” I am 6 kilometres above the Atlantic Ocean and about to lose a lot of weight.
They call this the vomit comet – and with good reason. When the pilot reaches the end of his countdown, he will pull back on the joystick, sending the aircraft into a 45-degree climb. A kilometre or so higher into the blue, he will cut back the engines. The plane’s momentum will take it soaring upwards until our ascent slows and stops and we begin to drop out of the sky. After a short while, the pilot will bring back the power and pull out of the dive. And then he’ll do it all again and again and again. In the next 3 hours, we are going to experience 31 of these gut-wrenching parabolas.
These manoeuvres are not just for fun: flights like this one have long been used for carrying out a wide variety of research where gravity would get in the way (see “Beating the pull”). For 23 seconds of the parabola, everyone on board will feel as if they are weightless. With the space shuttle still grounded, research slots on vomit comet flights are very much in demand.
“Ten seconds…five…” This had seemed like such a good idea when I first got the call. A team from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland was planning to test their new exercise equipment for astronauts aboard a parabolic flight. The idea was to find out if a kind of vibration therapy could help bones and muscles resist the damaging effects of long-term weightlessness …
