It was scary. My noise canceling headset had fallen off and had taken my hat and ballistic sunglasses with it. There was a pile between my legs. That was the first thing I remember my eyes being able to focus on after my blurry vision cleared. I didn’t know where I was and was feeling claustrophobic for the first time in my life. As I attempted to lift my head up I was only able to see the foreign gauges that I couldn’t comprehend. I had no option and became immediately scared.

It was bumpy like I’ve never experienced. The sounds were so crazy loud and I was strapped very tight into a 6 point harness. The plane was under so much stress coming out of a 4.75G loop I couldn’t lift my chin off my chest and my eye lids felt like I had bricks pulling them down and forcing them shut.

I looked up out of the clear plastic canopy and I saw a small single seat yak 50 with a red camo pattern no more than 50 feet from us. Propellor coming for us not with us. I could only see was the plane and the sky. We were in the middle of a dogfight. We were flying straight up and about to do the tail end of a second or potentially even third loop. I had no clue. By this point I knew I was in a plane and tried bracing myself but was too weak from blacking out. Keep in mind 100% of the planes controls are within arms reach in this type of plane. A simple bump of the knee or hand could send us in the wrong direction. We hit the max g spot of this loop (the bottom) and it was immediately lights out again. I didn’t have a chance to blink.

I eventually got my headset back on and was able to communicate to the piliot that we needed to pull out of the fight. We had already been killed and were safely cleared of the bottom deck.

I had a full body panic sweat. My entire body. Palms, ears, forearms, feet even my legs and face were dripping. I’ve only sweat this intensely twice before. Once was my first time trekking up a glacier that was 14k feet tall. I experienced altitude sickness and dehydration and pressed through it to the summit and down. The second was during my only experience in a Native American sweat lodge. I’m a believer of trying things once and willingly strapping into this dogfight was one of those moments.

Later when I was debriefing the Piliot said I was out for at least 60 seconds bobble heading and full on rag dolling in the back seat of the plane. He didn’t disengage from the fight until we got killed. After the debrief I hit the O2 tank like a drug addict in attempt to get a heron withdraw to simply just go away. It didn’t and I hit the shower…only to discover that at some point during my blackouts I didn’t only wakeup in a panic sweat. I woke up with no fluid in my body anymore. I the planes g force pushed all my piss out of my body and right into my pants. At the time I thought it was sweat.