So, as we've heard, emergencies are no rare occurrence in this jet. That goes doubly so for me as a pilot. In general, it's a bit of a joke. After most emergency situations, I find myself excited to have fought through it, and accomplished. I'm excited to come back and talk about it. After last night, I DON'T want to talk about it. But it occurs to me that the more I want to wall up and not talk, the more I NEED to talk it out like it's just another day at work.
There were two incidents of OBOGS issues/hypoxia here yesterday. One was me. In formation. At night. Solo.
I'd started with a safe-for-solo flight in night formations. It was a great flight, everything went well. I was a little slow to fix an acute on my initial join, but that was the only complaint, and both the lead and my trunk IP had good things to say about the rest of the flight, so I was feeling great and excited to get into my solo later in the night. When the time came for my solo, I walked out to my jet, and things started off on a bad note. We park our jets tail to tail, with a taxiway in between the parking lines. Well, the jet directly behind mine was being worked on by maintenance, and they were running up the engine. The whole freaking time. My entire pre-flight, I was getting blasted in the face by exhaust. It was enough that I could see MY engine spinning (fast) through the intakes due to the exhaust being blown the wrong way down my tailpipe. The whole preflight my eyes and lungs were burning a bit, and it continued as I climbed into the jet. But it's just discomfort from exhaust. I've had that happen before. Not for that duration and power setting, but I can't imagine that is at all uncommon. I got started up and taxid out to the runway as Dash-2.
Dash-1 took off, and then I took my place on the runway. My eyes were still stinging, but I imagined it was just a matter of time before that went away. As I ran the engine up to MRT, I got a blast of water in the face from the vents. (This is significant for two reasons: One, it made my eyes stop burning, but Two, they suspect there is a correlation between water in the ECS system, and contaminated oxygen). I made my takeoff, called "Kilo" and turned to head out to the TACAN Rendezvous point. It was odd, I was flying straight and level, but noticed I was having a hard time maintaining my airspeed. It was slowly walking up and down. I reached point one, and started on the turn to join up. As I was completing my join, it was... rough. I couldn't hit my groove and was meatfisting the hell out of the stick. (It turns out that was just my perspective, in the debrief, the IP said my join looked fine). As I took my position on the outside of the turn, I noticed I was breathing VERY hard. I tried to calm down, and told myself it was just the leftovers of all that exhaust I was breathing. I executed a crossunder, and felt inexplicably on edge. As we went for our night breakup and rendezvous, it fell apart. Now, the night BnR is BENIGN. Lead exectues a smooth roll, and pulls 14 units AOA for 180 degrees of turn. It's MAYBE a 1.5 G maneuver. Lead rolled, and then I did. As I did, I felt like I was tumbling. I was dizzy, I was having a hard time seeing lead (His lights were on bright, he was about 500 feet in front of me, but I was just struggling to focus on him). As I rolled out behind him, I was actively panting. I felt eyes darting around but I wasn't really processing what I was seeing. Before I could think any further, I saw him start his turn, and I decided that the only safe thing to do was try to fight through this until I completed the join. As I moved out to bearing line, I was having a hard time making sense of his lights. Then my surefire hypoxia symptoms set in: Air hunger, and unbridled terror. At this point, I started to accept that maybe I wasn't just feeling crappy from the preflight conditions. This might legitimately be an OBOGS issue. But the last thing I wanted to do was try to action anything mid join. It was hard enough to focus on the join, I just wanted to power through and get aboard. I know, in the sober light of day, that was the wrong thought process. I needed to get on O2 immediately to clear the symptoms. But in the moment, all I felt was suffocation and terror. I just wanted to get back to something familiar. As soon as I completed the join, I fumbled for the green ring. It took a few seconds to find, but I got it, and I tasted the beautiful taste of stale oxygen. I shut my OBOGS flow selector off, and radioed lead:
"Tron 11, Tron 12. I'm experiencing an episode. Green ring has been pulled, flow selector off."
"Tron 12, what? What's going on?"
"Tron 11. Suspect hypoxia. Green ring has been pulled flow selector off".
I was starting to feel better at least. I was still breathing HARD, and I was still scared, but I was starting to be able to focus. I was oscillating pretty badly on his wing, but it was starting to become manageable. He asked me whether I wanted to be detached as a single, change leads so I don't have to keep in formation, or stay on his wing. I didn't want to have to think, I was already struggling to keep calm, and I didn't want to deal with anything different, so I asked to stay on his wing. Forms are comfortable. Forms are safe. He asked if I wanted to be lead into a section straight in, or if I wanted the break. Again, I've only done a handful of section approaches. I've done the break a million times. I asked for the break. Break is comfortable. Break is safe. So he started leading me back.
Lead continued to check up on me throughout the flight, and I was starting to feel better. It was a very short flight home (We weren't more than 30 miles away when I pulled the green ring), but the oxygen was REALLY helping. By the time we hit the initial, I felt almost normal. As we crossed over the approach end numbers, my next breath was a struggle. Another breath. More struggle. The bottle was empty. I told my lead my bottle was empty, but I think he was caught off guard, because his only response as he broke was "What?" I dropped my mask to attempt to breathe, and everything exploded. In my first breath of cockpit air, I felt like I was tumbling again. I was nauseated, and I felt like everything was falling apart. I remember rolling out on downwind, struggling to follow lead. I felt like I was weaving back and forth trying to follow him. It took me multiple tries to get through my landing checklist. I don't recall reporting gear down and locked, but in the debrief, lead said I did. I made the landing, though it's a bit vague in my mind. At some point I realized cabin air was bad, because I shut off my airflow knob to dump pressure and let ram air in. As I rolled out behind lead, I followed him back to parking, trying to get everything cleaned up. It was still a bit blurry, but I got back. When I got to parking, I shut the engine down, and immediately opened the canopy for fresh air. I just sagged forward for a minute. I slowly unstrapped from the jet, and tried to get everything shut down properly, and hauled myself out of the jet. As I was stepping out, I realized I had never safed my ejection seat. (Should have been done leaving the runway). Fortunately, I DID pin it, but I wasn't comfortable with my shutdown, so I asked the PC to check my cockpits for me and make sure everything was okay. Apparently I had also forgotten the data brick, he handed it to me, and told me it was all good.
From there, it was writing up the jet as down, turning my mask and respirator in to be inspected, and filling out more paperwork at the Wind Duty Officer's office. Ironically as I was going through this, I heard another jet calling inbound with oxygen issues as well.
So that was that. This was the first time I really felt shaken after an emergency. I'm still a bit uneasy, but I've got a flight again tonight. Despite the emergency, our flight last night was complete, so we're pressing forward. I really want to get through this next flight, because I think the best thing to shake this feeling is to get back into the cockpit and have a successful flight.
