well howdy uh my name is adam savage uh i'm in my cave shop in san francisco and i am taking
questions i'm answering questions about my show mythbusters uh that we made from 2003 to thousand
and sixteen uh and today's question comes from tested patron uh cindy klink sydney wants to know
after having a few years to think about it what lingers in your mind about your u2 flight the
dragon lady yeah that's what the u2 spy plane is called um she says years ago i worked at the place
the youtube was developed the hangers were still there uh and part two of her question she wants to
know in your ride with the blue angels in the f a 18 hornets how close did you come to blacking out
in the positive g maneuvers oh i didn't come close at all to blacking out i blacked out
full stop everyone blacks out like the the the the blue angels pilots we were talking to
said it doesn't matter what kind of training you had they can make anyone pass out and
they can make anyone throw up they said um and i did i did both i did both um
i'm gonna answer your question backwards i'm gonna start with the blue angels which was an incredible
episode uh that was super fun to shoot it was an amazing group of pilots and professionals uh one
thing i didn't know is that i thought the blue angels was like some special rotation of pilots
but if you're a carrier pilot if you land jets on carriers you're a blue angel like
there's nothing more there's nothing more special than that to make you a blue angel so it's a kind
of a regular rotation the pilots go into um it's not some super elite like hand-picked group the
pilots who land on carriers are already that group of super elite hand-picked like insanity skills uh
there are so many stories um i broke the speed of sound seven times i pulled seven and a half g's
without passing out twice yeah that that that is super intense and i passed out three times over
the course of two flights i did no sorry i did three flights over two days um being a passenger
in an fa-18 is exhausting it is akin to being a passenger in an indy car which i have also done
and is also exhausting for the same reasons the centrifugal force moving you around um
but the the level of skill and the level of precision in the teams that that are in the
blue angels surpassed surpassed my my surpassed my possible understanding um i will give an example
i flew three times uh and two of those times i was in the lead plane but the third time i
was in the second plane uh for the way we were filming and that was an even more impressive
flight to me because while we were going the same speeds the pilot was showing me how they position
in midair for flight maneuvers and it's all about lining your eyes up as the pilot with some part of
the plane that's next to you it might be here and it might be here and if you line up
some part of your canopy with the hornet's eye and some part of the logo well actually uh on
the on the wing of an f-18 hornet there is this little uh upright rectangle and that's a airflow
linearizer i i don't know exactly what it's for airflow and it's for reducing
the turbulence of airflow but it has a yellow border around it and two marks
and if you line up one of those marks with the hornet's eye if i remember correctly
that will put you in a one plane back for a delta formation where everyone's flying like geese
and if you lined up with a different part that's a different formation and so each of the pilots
has their knowledge of the choreography uh of the choreography and they they go through it they
they actually they walk through the choreography on the ground first which is really neat
uh the special choreography and then they go up in the planes and they do it
so that was neat to see the sort of inside baseball of how they achieved those maneuvers
but realize that i'm in an airplane traveling at like 600 miles an hour
while i'm having this conversation and the pilot who's flying is conversationally telling me about
this and he's like for instance if i want to line up the mark with the eye of the hornet and then
he does it and okay so this is us this is them so he's like i can line it up here i can line up
here i can line up here i can line up here so those maneuvers i just did with my hand
picture a 30 000 pound plane going 600 miles an hour moving in relationship to another
object with the same dead stop precision no backlash no nothing i'm serious like you're
in a boat takes a long time to turn you know there's a lot of long tail from your actions
you move big things they have momentum they shift they shake they shimmy these planes
nothing it was mechanically magic i've never been in a device that precise that was that large since
then chris hadfield told me the hornet is the plane that you can forget that you're flying
and not that like oh i forgot i'm flying it's that it's such an intuitive machine that you can kind
of let go of the con once you know enough about the flying you can let go of the controls and
it just feels like it's an extension of your of your thought that sounds amazing um that
kind of perspective from the team from the blue angels was thrilling absolutely thrilling i asked
my pilot who who freelanced for federal express at the same time as he was in the blue angels
which i thought was pretty neat i said what is the hardest thing you've ever done in the hornet and
he said the most difficult thing is landing on a carrier in stormy seas specifically for him it was
the north atlantic in the middle of the night in stormy seas and he told me something i didn't know
about landing on a carrot carrier in in heavy and heavy uh heavy surf heavy water heavy water
this thing barely works anymore um in heavy heavy swells so the carrier goes up and down with the
waves and the plane is trying to land on the carrier there is an optimal relationship and
the optimal relationship if i remember correctly is that the plane has to land on the carrier
at the bottom of the at the bottom of the of the rise if it catches it if it catches it on
its way up it's just going to bounce right off the deck so it's got to hit it on the downslope
plus you can't really see the carrier from the plane this pilot reported to me uh and
so you're trusting this guy on the front of the carrier look i know that so many people watching
this have actually done this and have worked on these carriers and know this way better than i do
please forgive if i'm forgetting key details for this but he told me there's a guy on the deck
who is like seeing you he can see your plane and he's got you on the com and
he's telling you one degree left two degrees right stay up go down and you are trusting him
that is a level so
years and years and years ago my parents were very good friends with
an early test pilot named nick jones uh and if i remember correctly nick was the generation of
pilots after the the the the nasa generation so like the 70s right not the 60s with the 70s and
he had flown a lot of planes and he said specifically when you're a test pilot there is
um there is that there is no such thing if you're a test pilot there's no such thing as pilot error
and i asked what that meant and he said we you can't be you're always flying something
that has never been flown before so you can't worry if it's going to stay in the air or not
you just can't have that be part of the mental palace of stuff you've got to remember you've
got to trust the machine and you've got to assume that you have all the control
the level of sort of taking on the responsibility that is crazy intense to me uh
and that's what it takes to land on a carrier from what i understand um the other thing that blew my
mind about pulling seven and a half g's and not passing out was how much energy it took from me
uh they give you an exercise when you are learning to do this where you go like you're
having a particularly difficult bowel movement uh and you do this to keep the blood that's here
pressured up into your head so you you do that with the pilot before you leave
everyone knows that you know how to do it you get up there and the pilot will
say time to do your breathing and start to do the breathing and he pulls into a heavy bank
and i mean you're just doing it with all your strength and even with all your strength even
with doing it with all my strength i saw a tunnel forming i saw a tunnel forming and
the pilot who's talking to me can see and he can only see me in this like little tiny
mirror on his right he can see that i'm passing out he's like stay with me adam and so i start
even more and the tunnel starts to go away like i am
using the blood in my body to keep my consciousness
just amazing just totally bizarre but what you should realize is the pilot who's talking to me
and saying hey stay with me adam stay with me he is doing the same amount of muscular work keeping
the blood in his head as i am except he works out every day for a couple of hours because he has to
in order to be able to use his own body to keep from passing out from the g-load right because the
blue angels and hornet pilots don't wear g-suits they can't because when the g-suit inflates
as it inflates it can affect your ability to steer the yoke and that steering is everything
to the hornet thus they do it all with this piece of equipment um but you asked about the
u2 the thing that i remember most about the wonderful team at beale air force base was
they only let one civilian every couple of years fly in those things
i'm super grateful to have been one of those civilians
and it was a delight to spend a week up at beale working with that team they love their dragon lady
they love those planes they love them they they love their history they love being part
of that history they are proud rightfully proud of the incredible longevity of these old planes
and what they can do and they delight in showing other people so it's every aspect about flying
in the dragon lady was like first of all it's an incredible piece of equipment it has
a mind-blowing history to it it's done impressive things and then there's this
team that takes care of it and then taking care of it literally you should understand
they take that whole plane down to its rivets every few years and rebuild it from scratch
in order to make sure that all of the systems work perfectly uh it's it is non-trivial to keep one of
those to keep a plane in the air for decades and decades and decades and there are still things
that the dragon lady can do and does that there are no other options for um so my most primary
memory aside from the thrill of being able to see so much of california in a single glance
was the the pride and pleasure of working with the the team at beale seriously
it was really really fun um and it was one of those it was one of the later seasons i think
it was the second to last season um yep i will never forget being able to have done that and
being able to go to the edge of space see the blackness of space see how thin i mean yeah i
i they allow me to do that and i will be forever grateful yeah i know i've
expressed my gratitude a million times in this video already but
come on it's like the more i think you i think you're seeing i'm getting more excited as i talk
about it than i was at the beginning of this question okay it's time for me to go get some
dinner thank you guys so much for the awesome questions uh tested patrons keep submitting your
questions and i will continue to answer them and as always i will see you guys next time stay safe