I’ve always wanted to do this since I heard Penn Jillette tell a story about one of the founding flights of Zero-G where he went up, stripped naked, and played a ukulele while floating around the plane before he started puking. The organization was apparently quite sketchy back then and they’ve refined the system since then to the point where they claim that only 3% of people puke.
Zero-G has come up in a lot of podcasts I’ve been listening to lately, so I decided “If not now, when..” and signed up because I was going to be in the area anyway for some training classes. Lina was very worried about the puking, and considered it an expensive indulgence when she thought she had to pay for the trip out of her savings. Suddenly it wasn’t that expensive when I mentioned it was coming out of the vacation budget and she signed up too. I’m glad she did, because it was a blast.
The plane flies into it’s designated airspace at 24,000 feet and then starts a steep dive to simulate the gravity on Mars down to 12,000 feet for about 30 seconds. Then the pilot manually pulls up to climb back to 24,000 feet where we experience about 2Gs. He then does another dive to simulate the gravity on the moon a couple of times to get us acclimated to the big show, Zero G.
We experience Zero G about 12 more times in 30 second intervals and it feels amazing. They warn you not to try and swim because it won’t do any good. EVERYONE tries to swim on the first run because your body doesn’t know what else to do. They also tell you to make small movements so you don’t hurt yourself, or the plane. I barely moved and ended up smashing into to the roof, knocking a panel off the plane, and nearly kicked a few fellow passengers trying to stay in our area on the first run.
Lina was fine throughout the trip, but I got a little queasy after I tried to do as many forward Zero-G rolls as I could in 30 seconds on the last run.
I highly recommend anyone thinking about doing it, SIGN UP TODAY.
Here’s the pictures.
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