{"id":37692,"date":"2026-10-16T09:43:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T16:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=37692"},"modified":"2026-10-16T09:55:38","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T16:55:38","slug":"turning-pages-pulling-gs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=37692","title":{"rendered":"Turning Pages, Pulling Gs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"now<\/a>Book club tomorrow and we’re hosting. I should say Donna’s hosting, because she’s doing all the work: cleaning up the living room, making snacks. We’re discussing Mexican author \u00c1lvaro Enrigue’s historical novel Now I Surrender<\/a><\/strong>, nominally about the Mexican and American armies’ pursuit of and eventual capture of Geronimo, the last of the great Apache leaders, but also the story of the settlement of Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico, and southern Arizona. I nominated this book; the more I learn about the Southwest, the more fascinated I am by its history.<\/p>\n

From my Goodreads review<\/a><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

I’ve lived in Tucson, Arizona, since 1997. I’ve visited many of the sites where Mangas Coloradas’ and Geronimo’s Apaches holed up, and the locations where the Mexican Army and American cavalry units chasing them set up camp. People around here still regard the Apaches with awe; some even continue to hold strong opinions about Pancho Villa (who also makes an appearance in Now I Surrender). Most of this area’s history is ugly, even shameful … but by god it is fascinating, and \u00c1lvaro Enrigue gives it life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Speaking of book reviews, I haven’t shared any here or on Daily Kos in some time, mainly because they’ve gotten shorter. Where once I’d write several paragraphs about a book I read and enjoyed (or hated), these days I’m doing well to come up with two or three sentences. Super-short\u00a0 reviews, even if they’re pithy, don’t come up to my standards of what’s blog-worthy, so I’ve pretty much stopped sharing them here. If you really want to know, here’s my Goodreads profile<\/a><\/strong>, which links to what I’m reading, what I’ve read, and all the reviews I’ve written (over 1,000 to date).<\/p>\n

\n

A friend in the Bay Area shared a KQED interview<\/a><\/strong> with a former commander of the Navy Blue Angels demonstration team. The interview mostly focused on tight formation flying and what it takes, the G-forces team members experience during maneuvers, and the F\/A-18 Super Hornets they fly. I know a bit about those subjects, and though I don’t know any Blue Angels pilots, I do know pilots who flew with the Air Force Thunderbirds team, so I responded with a few thoughts of my own:<\/p>\n

Blue Angels pilots don\u2019t wear G-suits when they perform. Thunderbirds pilots do. The reason is the Navy\u2019s Hornet has a traditional center stick. Your stick arm rests on your right leg during maneuvering and the rapid inflating\/deflating of a G-suit might move it, resulting in unwanted control inputs when you\u2019re trying to hold tight formation. The Thunderbirds’ F-16 Viper has a side stick and your arm rests on the right console, so the G-suit doesn\u2019t interfere. Any rate, except for the two solo pilots, who pull a lot of Gs during some of their maneuvers, the max Gs the central four-ship core of each team pulls during airshow routines is more on the order of\u00a0 four to five, not seven to nine, and if you strain your legs and belly properly, you can easily handle it without a G-suit.<\/span><\/p>\n

On day-to-day flights, Navy or USAF, fighter crews fly similar tight formations, and in air-to-air training practice post-merge maneuvering \u2026 dogfighting, in other words. They practice long-range missile shots as they approach one another, those being their primary weapons, but what if the enemy survives to the merge? Now they\u2019re fighting in a tight visual circle, Spad versus Fokker style, each going for guns on the other, and they\u2019ll go from negative two to positive nine Gs over and over in a couple of minutes, until one of them \u201cdies\u201d and is out of the fight. Then they’ll do it again, and again, sweat pouring down from their helmets, sheeting over their eyes, panting for breath. After a typical one-hour training flight, they’ll feel like they’ve done a couple of rounds with George Foreman.<\/p>\n

I admire the hell out of Blue Angel and Thunderbird pilots \u2026 I flew with a couple of wingmen who went on to fly with the latter \u2026 but they don’t do anything line fighter pilots don’t do, and probably don’t pull as many Gs. Still, before they were Blue Angels or Thunderbirds, they were in the trenches with the rest of us, paying their dues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And while we’re speaking of tight formations and pulling Gs …<\/p>\n

\"HUq283lWUAAu2yC\"<\/a>
Uncredited photo of a BAE Hawk flying low-level in the UK’s Mach Loop, October 2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

… there’s worse feelings than feeling like you’ve done a couple of rounds with George Foreman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book club tomorrow and we’re hosting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1960,412,3,64,555,14,2],"tags":[2704,3087,4950,4951,4952,4379],"class_list":["post-37692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-air-minded","category-books-reviews","category-flying","category-history","category-local-color","category-military","category-personal","tag-airminded","tag-bookclub","tag-baglunch","tag-bajaarizona","tag-geronimo","tag-sierrahotel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37692"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37700,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37692\/revisions\/37700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}