Most readers will probably be thinking “No it
can’t. Don’t be absurd!” I hope so because if not there might not be enough
curiosity to encourage you to read on.
Good. You at least have persevered. Absurd it may
be but nevertheless, I stand by my statement. Clearly, I haven’t died from
motion sickness, or anything else just yet, so I need to tell my story of how
motion sickness could have taken, and in fact very nearly took, my life and the
life of at least one other. Dramatic enough? A bit too much? Stay with me.
I have had a sulky and slightly green-tinged
relationship with motion sickness for as long as I can remember. Ignoring those
early queasy rides in the claustrophobic rear seat of my step-father’s Ford
Zodiac in the 1960s, weaving and rolling along the windy lanes of the Isle of
Wight’s chalk Downs, my first full-on encounter was with mal de mere, zeeziekte or
seasickness as the sick-bag provided helpfully explained in 3 languages.
Actually, before we cast into historic oblivion those
memories of mildly nauseous, pre-seatbelt era jaunts across the Island, I
should perhaps explain the purpose of our journeys. If indeed it really
qualifies as a ‘purpose’. My step-father was a curious man, in every aspect of
that adjective. Confining our attention to the sort of curiosity that is said
to kill cats or to elongate the nose of the elephant’s child (check out Kipling
if you are scratching your head), he wanted to know how other people lived.
Obviously, he could visit friends and relations,
and note their choice of house, furnishings, garden landscaping, clothes, even
partners. But that limited his insatiable curiosity to people he knew and that
was far from enough for ‘Jack’. He wanted a much larger sample of the
population from which to illustrate his dinner time anecdotes on the habitual
idiosyncrasies of our fellow Isle of Wight residents.
Hence, after weekend lunches at our home near the
centre of the Island we would head out on a random spoke towards the coastal
periphery, in search of new domestic pastures to explore. Mother and step-father
in front, brother and occasionally step-sister in the back we would emerge from
the driveway on another bizarre quest.
The way it worked was Jack would look for a grand
gateway or house sign out in the countryside. I should explain that his curiosity
did not extend to how suburban people lived. Once the target was identified he
would simply sweep up the drive until we reached the front of whatever house
appeared at the end. Handbrake on, engine off he would clamber out (he was a
very large curious man) and look about as if a little perplexed.
Eventually an owner or two would appear and ask,
“Can I help you?”
“Oh” Jack would reply, “I’m so sorry, we were
heading for [insert fictitious location]
but must have taken a wrong turn”.
To cut a long, and in my childhood oft repeated,
story short, this almost invariably ended with us sipping tea and nibbling cake
in the kitchen/parlour/drawing room of the strangers’ house before we kids went
to play in the garden with inevitable dogs and the adults had a tour of the
property. Curiosity satisfied, at least until next weekend. Now I’ve got that
off my chest we really can ignore that first gentle brush with motion sickness
and get back to the real thing.
The aforementioned multi-lingual sick-bag was to
be found in a cramped inside cabin on the Dutch cruise liner Neu Amsterdam.
Mother, brother and I were, for some reason now unclear to me, making our way
from Southampton to the Irish port town of Cobh by way of the second leg of the
ship’s trans-Atlantic voyage from Rotterdam to New York. Quite why we didn’t
take the train and ferry or fly as we had done before I don’t recall.
Ship-board life seemed rather grand until we met
an enormous Atlantic swell in the Channel and the great vessel began to sway
like an inverted pendulum. Meal services were curtailed, water slopped heavily
out of the swimming pools, Mother threw up her false teeth over the ship’s rail
and I retreated to the little cabin to wallow in self-pity. Lying in my narrow
bunk I was utterly incapacitated by the effects of the ship’s movement and
quietly prayed for death; or at least a speedy arrival in Ireland. That’s the
thing about motion sickness and me, the instant the motion stops the symptoms
disappear. Rather like childbirth (so I’m told) I seem to forget the hours of
hell in an instant and become immediately willing to subject myself to a another,
similar ‘moving’ experience.
So in part, that is how I came to my next, rather
more sustained and significantly more unpleasant, experience with the restless
sea. For yet another forgotten purpose, when I finished school I was determined
to join Father and brother in the English West Country. As a commercial fisherman.
Now with hindsight this can be seen as a questionable choice for someone
evidently predisposed to seasickness but with the blithe and blinkered
determination of male teenage, I went west. Almost literally, or so it felt.
If you have never experienced the rearing deck of
crab fishing boat, tossed on a raging sea, tormented by winds that whip spray
from the wave crests, driving it into eyes and ears, as a cold grey dawn rises
to the east of some remote place a hundred miles south of the Devon coast, I
probably don’t have words adequate to describe it. Seasickness is a
psychological malaise as much as a physical one and the torment knew no bounds.
In an environment where the men were tough and laughed in the face of
adversity, it was an added misery to be the sickly kid barely able to
contribute to the task of catching crustaceans and even less able to justify a
share of the proceeds from the catch. Especially awkward that as soon as the
catch was landed and we hit the pub, I felt fine.
Suffice to say that I have since dabbled in
offshore yacht racing (a mix of becalmed boredom and storm-driven chaos), served
as an apprentice in the Royal Navy and navigated ships in the Merchant Navy, so
there have been plenty of other aquatic experiences that have challenged my
semi-circular canals. But none of them can support my assertion that motion
sickness can kill. What this catalogue of deeply unpleasant episodes did reveal
is that some of us can be ‘desensitised’ from the undesirable effects of the
condition. After the first predictably nauseous 24 hours at sea the symptoms
would vanish and I could spend the rest of each voyage reading books, eating
meals and doing my job just like a real seafarer. Of course, I did begin to
suffer from ‘land sickness’ when returning from a long spell at sea but that is
another story.
Having learned of my vulnerability to motion
sickness, my next adventure was not the obvious choice. I decided that I needed
to become a pilot. Not just any pilot but a military pilot. Not just any
military pilot but one of the ones who flies jets. The ones who roar around the
place at airshows making lots of noise, pulling lots of g-s, before turning on
a sixpence and coming back to do it again. It turns out that isn’t all they do
either; they spend some time hurtling through the twisting valleys of Wales or
chasing each other around the sky in mock dog-fights. Mostly because it’s good
fun. Unless you get airsick of course…
I started my flying career on a fairly sedate jet
trainer – capable of 300 knots through the air but nevertheless sedate in
comparison to what was to come. However, there was a new problem I hadn’t
bargained for. I discovered I was a bit of a party animal in what was, to be
frank, ‘party town’. A horde of young aspiring fighter pilots all vying for the
attention of; well of anyone who would pay them attention. Drinking alcohol appeared to
be an essential element of every activity except flying. There was even a beer
fridge in the squadron crew room and a polished stainless steel Harvey Wall-banger
bucket hanging from a bracket on the wall. I suspect those days have gone.
0700 AM met brief with a raging hangover could be
a bit of challenge in itself but a 45 minute general handling sortie of steep
turns and stalls, seated cheek-by-jowl next to a vigilant and critical
instructor, was a whole new game.
“Feeling OK today Gillespie?”
“Hundred and ten percent Sir! Ready to give it a
thrashing.”
Apparently, hangovers are also a form of emetic
and I learnt my lesson quickly, after sheepishly carrying a soggy sick bag back
to the line office. Motion sickness wasn’t going to kill me just yet.
The rest of the basic flying training went well
from what I recall, apart from a 300 knots encounter with a seagull just above
the Northamptonshire countryside. With surprising inertia for a bird it peeled
open the metal nose of the aircraft, turned itself into mince and obliterated
the entire of my windscreen. Fortunately, there was a colleague in the other
seat who could still see and safely flew us home.
Non-hangover induced airsickness, the real thing,
turned up early in the next phase of training. Very early. With good reason the
first scheduled sortie of most flying courses is something of a demo flight; no
specific exercises just a chance for the instructor to show how the new
aircraft type performs. With far less good reason most instructors seem to interpret
this loose sortie plan to mean ‘throw the aeroplane around at the very limits
of its performance to see just what the student is made of’. Mercifully, in the
new aircraft the student sat in front of the instructor not beside him but it
was still tricky to disguise retching and vomiting into a paper bag whilst
upside down at 500 knots.
This was the first of a number of unfortunate
events and, although we discovered that I was far less prone to sickness when
doing the flying myself, it was only a matter of time before lost and curtailed
sorties raised a question mark over my career. The doctors tried medication but
as I suspected, the tablets were placebos and had no noticeable effect. Turns
out you can’t take conventional travel sickness pills and fly jets; who knew?
Something about drowsiness.
At some point I remembered the desensitising
effects of prolonged exposure to motion at sea, perhaps that could help? Alarmingly,
the Doc’s response was to suggest a spell on the centrifuge at the Institute of
Aviation Medicine! Kill or cure. That sounded horrific so I hastily proposed an
alternative period of daily exposure to flying similar manoeuvres but as a
‘passenger’ in the back seat. Plenty of sorties flew with only one seat
occupied so this was viable and eventually the bosses were persuaded to give it
a try. The quid pro quo was that I
was suspended from training for the duration. Seemed a bit drastic to me but I
had no choice – it was that or the centrifuge.
And it worked. I had a bit of a struggle for the
first day or so but it didn’t matter because I wasn’t trying to fly as well as
vomit. Just like at sea, I soon lost sensitivity to the rolling, spinning,
looping and generally hurtling around and within weeks I was allocated a place
on the next course. Just with the proviso to ‘keep him flying’. A few months
later the course was complete and I was awarded my ‘wings’, now officially a
pilot. Albeit one rather prone to
motion sickness. Still not dead though.
Predictably, between the advanced flying course
and the next phase of tactical weapons training there was a gap in flying. What
happens in a gap? I become re-sensitised to motion and the whole thing begins
again. This course was designed to take well-trained pilots and teach them how
to fight; same plane so not much new there but the exercises were more
aggressive, more dynamic, more sickness inducing. One might expect this to have
been a course too far for me but contrarily, the worse it got the more
determined I became to keep going. And my bosses had spent a lot of time and
money on me by then so they had no incentive to let me go.
The solution? Same again: suspended from training,
sat in the back, daily flying, short period of struggle then sorted. The time
between courses was a bit longer this time so they dreamed up ‘useful’ things
for me to do while I waited for the next course to start. I was taught how to aerial
tow an air-to-air gunnery target for example. Bearing in mind there were
weapons students loosing off live rounds of ammunition a few hundred metres
behind my aircraft, hopefully destined for the ‘flag’ target, it wasn’t my
favourite option. Rather better was leading the ‘cine weave’ exercise, as the
pursuers fought to keep my aircraft in their gun sight as I banked and rolled
ahead of them. No live ammo but the collision risk was significant.
I was beginning to enjoy myself and getting very
comfortable with the aircraft. One morning I was assigned to fly in the back
seat with one of the instructors, on a ‘bounce’ sortie. Two other similar jets
had been tasked with a low-level simulated bombing mission, following a route
through the Welsh countryside to attack a couple of targets. ‘Low-level’ for a
training flight was constrained by a 250 feet minimum separation distance,
meaning they had to stay at least 250 feet above the ground and anything
attached to the ground. The same rule applied to us and it was our job to find
them, ‘attack’ them and stop them hitting their targets.
We knew their planned route, which was very helpful
and perhaps slightly unrealistic, and we knew they would be flying at 420
knots, or 7 miles a minute, so we could work out where they would be at any
given time. Before take-off the front-seater and I agreed the best spot for our
ambush would be in valley to the northeast of the town of Carmarthen. The
attack pair set off and after short time we barrelled down the runway, took off
and banked steeply out over the Bristol Channel, as we had so many times
before.
Things happen fast at 400 plus knots and soon we
flashed over the Welsh coast at the Gower Peninsula. No time to admire the
view, we had planes to catch! Leaving Carmarthen to our right we banked around
the outskirts and dropped down into a valley to the north of the town, perfect
cover for our attack. The aircraft did not have a radar altimeter but from
experience I judged that we were spot on our minimum separation distance of 250
feet above the valley floor, with trees and fields whipping past on either side.
My estimate was later proven to be eerily accurate.
Visibility was a bit misty but as I looked out to
our left, I saw the dark angular webbed outline of an electricity pylon,
perched on the ridge line above us. Quickly looking to the right, I saw a
similar pylon silhouetted against the pale grey sky behind it. Chances were
that there was something joining these two together.
I just had time to shout “Pylons!” before
something dark flicked past the canopy and our little cockpit world lit up in
great blue flash of light. This was followed immediately by the illumination of
just about every warning light the instrument panel had, accompanied by a
deafening a cacophony of bells and horns. Something clearly wasn’t as it should
have been.
The instructor pulled back on the control column
sending us almost vertically skywards, gaining precious altitude in case our
one engine was damaged. As we shot up, the pilots of our target aircraft just a
few miles away had seen the bright flash of light and broke off their mission
to investigate. What they saw was our jet trailing a plume of what they thought
was smoke and told us on the radio. It later turned out to be a fine mist of
hydraulic fluid leaking from the damaged wing but the message had the effect of
focusing our attention even more, if that were possible. We discussed whether
we would need to eject, and I nervously tightened my straps in anticipation.
But wait a minute, the engine was still running,
the aircraft was still flying and it was responding correctly to the controls.
Perhaps we weren’t going to die. Thoughts turned to other things.
“We’re going to be in trouble for this”, groaned
my colleague.
I was a bit offended by the ‘we’ part but it
wasn’t the time to argue. After assessing the damage and finding what bits of
the aircraft were still working, we headed to the nearest available military
airfield. Miraculously we were soon parked on the runway and clambering out of
the cockpit to some very welcome terra
firma. It looked as if someone had taken a giant can-opener to our wings.
The subsequent board of enquiry determined that
the aircraft had hit and severed the top three cables between the pylons, at 70
degrees of right bank and about 440 knots. The left wing took out the top cable
and the right wing took care of the pair below. Clearly, we hadn’t maintained
the requisite separation from the cables! Lucky for us, geometry showed that in
normal conditions the lowest point of the cables would be 246 feet above the
valley floor. The bosses seemed to think that was an acceptable margin of
error.
So did I die? No. But it was frighteningly clear
that if we had been wings level at impact and any of the cables had struck the
cockpit canopy, it would have taken the canopy off and both our heads with it. I
understand that’s usually fatal. And was motion sickness to blame? Well I was
only in that seat, at that time, flying down that valley because of my
recurring airsickness, so I think so, yes… Motion sickness can kill!
