I graduated from high school in 1982 in Hawaii. When other teenage boys were working part time to pay for gas to drive their parents' car, I was delivering newspapers and working janitorial to pay for avgas for weekend lessons.
I received a 'gift flight' on my 14th birthday. It was a ticket for a one-time tourist flight and the pilot took me over Honolulu, then over Pearl Harbor, the pilot banked starboard and when I saw all those ships underwater, especially the Arizona Memorial, I knew the USAF was my next destination. Funny thing, I do not get airsick, but I do get seasick. It was just the constant slow up/down
movement on the water that is different than the usually abrupt actions in flying that make the difference. I do not get seasick on fast moving boats like catamarans where you get to hang over the side or on speedboats, but I get queasy on the larger and slow moving fishing boats type.
Anyway...On the F-111, my first jet, 'hard' terrain following (TF) at night over the hills of Scotland is still the scariest aviation related experience of my USAF yrs. The TF feature have three modes: Soft, Med, and Hard.
Hard TF is where the jet take the minimum possible depth and minimum possible height so the flight is rough. Often, trees in the winter do not have a lot of leaves to reflect radar signals so a mostly bare tree will not be detected by the jet's TF radar, then as the jet crest the hilltop, the tree branches will scrape the jet's underside. Often crewchiefs will remove small branches and splinters out of panels. For any first timer F-111 TF flight, it was unnerving to see the control stick moving back and forth by itself --
BETWEEN YOUR LEGS. I was at RAF Upper Heyford, UK, back then.
The F-16 was my second assignment. Usually, an F-111 assignment is pretty much 'for life' because there was no other jets like it, other than the B-1, so leaving the F-111 is near impossible. But I thought 'What the hell' and applied for reassignment to the F-16. St. Joseph is the patron saint of aviation, because he supposedly levitated, must have have had a good day in heaven and granted my request. So off I went to MacDill in Florida. Nine g in the F-16 have nothing equivalent back then. Not even the F-15 or the smaller T-38 can match. In the F-111, it was pretty much an office of a cockpit, but under the F-16's bubble canopy, you feel like you are on top of the world. The view is just one word -- magnificent. Then I knew what the F-15 guys felt like. A slight twitch of the wrist and the jet will instantly roll, giving you the view of the Earth below while the jet maintains that stable attitude without you. Even on the analog A model, the jet was amazing.
Keep flying whenever you can, even if just once a month. When you get older, the memories will be worth it and very few can match.
but I know enough to call out BSs in a forum like this.
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