Physical Considerations

To illustrate the difficulty of shooting from a high-performance military aircraft, let's inject a little discomfort. You are dressed in thirty pounds of helmet, parachute harness, survival vest, G suit, flight suit, flight gloves, flight boots and, just for show, a flowing white silk scarf. And make it all fit like a pair of wing-tip shoes, one size too small. Fresh off the press. Hard as a rock. Flexible as plate glass. The resulting claustrophobia, most likely, will pare down our list of photographers somewhat.

The list of photographers decreases a lot more when we throw in motion. So far, we have a situation analogous to traveling sixty miles an hour in a car, shooting another subject, also in motion. But, let's add the z-vector: the third dimension, the vertical plane. So, now imagine photographing a small plane from another plane, both travelling at sixty knots, about two thousand feet off the ground. There's movement horizontally, but also in a new direction, up and down. Well, perhaps you're still with me, but now let's put the throttle to the firewall -- and dial up the velocity, say ten times, to six hundred knots.

So, you're sitting in a cold, cramped cockpit with little or no room for movement and your body is firmly pasted onto a hard, not-at-all-designed-for-comfort chair. The plane is shooting along at a high rate of speed, when the pilot decides to pull some G's: that is, bring centrifugal and gravitational forces into the equation. How does one explain the sensation? An everyday example is driving a car too fast around a turn. You feel a mild, transverse or sideways force all over your body. The invisible force even pulls at the lightest part of you, your hair. It tugs gently but relentlessly at the skin over your face. Even your lips and eyelids stray imperceptibly to the right or left. You experience this centrifugal force while accelerating at only one and a half Gs.

On a roller coaster, going forty miles per hour around a banked turn, you may experience up to two or three Gs. That's probably the most a race car driver will pull, three Gs. At three Gs, all the sensations described above become more perceptible. You revert to being a child all over again, experiencing the unknown, unable to comprehend the invisible hand that pulls and tugs and jerks you about.

So, you are dressed in a space suit, shoehorned into a cramped can, screaming through space at a fast clip, pulling five or seven or nine Gs. Now, there's one other requirement we'll ask of you, which at this point may seem like a nuisance: you have to think. Think about the images you'd like to photograph. Think about the background on which you'll paint your image. Think about the correct exposure. Think about dramatic lighting. Think about whether there's milk in the refrigerator, or whether you'll chunk all over the canopy on the first seven-hundred-twenty-degree-per-second roll.

Also, the US Navy would like to remind you to think about their thirty-million dollar carnival ride. More specifically, please don't break it. Don't push or pull any buttons or toggle switches. Don't turn any dials or knobs. Don't touch the throttle. Don't even think of touching the control stick. And, above all, please do not accidentally pull the ejection-seat handle. And what if there's an in-flight emergency? An engine fire, or worse, a cockpit fire? Think about running through a checklist of detailed options that may save the fannies of you and your driver. What if your driver were rendered unconscious and you had to bail out on your own? Think about all the permutations of potential disasters. All the inherent dangers. Or even death. Military fighter pilots do die, dozens each year. And they are well trained. The possibility for disaster permeates the skies. Mother nature and fate know no race, creed, color, or level of experience. The reality of jet-fighter photography, while it may seem cool to the outsider, can be vague and ambiguous and dangerous on the inside. >