Originally Posted by
Lou Scannon
There were stories that in the early days some single seat heroes used to cut the feed pipe off their G suits. Theses could be left sticking out of their flying suit pockets to convince others that they did indeed follow instructions and fly with a G suit but avoided the inconvenience and discomfort in actually wearing one under their suits.
Not a problem wearing a flying suit with a cut-off hose but fatal if, like one Buc pilot, you tried it with an immersion suit and had to bang out into a fjord. Suit rapidly topped up with freezing water through the cut-off tube.
I must admit that I rarely wore an internal g-suit under an immersion suit but then the Jumping Bean only had small wings - actually, rumour had it that their main function was to allow the mounting of the training wheels, which stopped the aircraft falling over on the ground!
mog