Video: Insane F/A-18 Hornet low level flight through the canyons of Northern California

Published on: September 3, 2012 at 5:30 PM

This is one of those videos that may give you motion sickness symptoms.

An F/A-18 Hornet flies at high speed through the canyons of Northern California “ridiculously close to the ground”. Noteworthy, in order to keep the aircraft treetop and avoid pulling too many negative Gs, the pilot rolls the plane inverted (thus pulling positive Gs – if he pushed the nose down at those speeds he would impose less tolerable Gs on himself).

As already explained, in the age of stealth bombers and standoff weapons, low-level high-speed flying to exploit the terrain masking, is still one of the most important parts of both planes and helicopters combat pilot training.

http://youtu.be/Z17UgPlfEMI

H/T to Bill Garcia for the heads-up

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David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.
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