The physical effort of an F-16 fighter pilot in an aerial combat that you don't see in the movies

@DefAviation ES 9·09·2023 · 21:54 0

In the military aeronautical field, dogfights are known as closed aerial combats against an enemy plane or planes.

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A dogfight is the situation that most tests a pilot's skill and also his physical preparation, due to the gravitational force (G) it supports in the tightest turns. To give us an idea, a Formula 1 driver can support up to 5G, but a fighter pilot can reach 9G. This requires enormous physical effort that includes breathing exercises to avoid losing consciousness, in addition to the use of the antigravity suits that we already saw here.

At the end of June, Hasard Lee, a veteran F-16 and F-35 pilot who has flown 82 combat missions and works as an instructor, published an interesting video in which we see a US Air Force (USAF) air combat exercise at Nellis AFB, Nevada, near Las Vegas. The video of the exercise shows a dogfight and also the effort that the pilot has to make during some of the maneuvers, something that is almost never seen in the movies:

Let's see some details of the video here. Here we can see the Thales Scorpion helmet worn by this F-16C pilot, a helmet that I already talked about here. Unlike old pilot helmets, the Scorpion has a full-color HMD (Helmet-Mounted Display), which offers the pilot information from the traditional HUD (Head-Up Display, the glass screen). which is located above the instrument panel) through a glass panel located in front of the right eye. This helmet has the advantage that the pilot has the flight data from the HUD regardless of which direction he is looking at at any given time.

This image shows us what the F-16 has on its port wing. On its marginal support it carries an AIM-120 AMRAAM medium-range air-to-air missile. In addition, the outer underwing support has an LVC nacelle, used in training to generate aerial combat simulation.

In this image we see the armament of the starboard wing. As on the port wing, it carries an AMRAAM missile on the marginal support and an AIM-9 Sidewinder short-range air-to-air missile.

An image of the dogfight in which we see the enemy plane, in this case another F-16. Nellis AFB is the base of the 64th Aggressor Squadron, equipped with F-16C and F-16D that play the role of enemy aircraft during this type of training.