Full Throttle Captures a Civilian Backseat Ride in an Edwards F-16 Viper

Acceleration presses Louis Skupien into the rear seat the moment Major Anthony “Hash” Pipe lights the afterburner on the runway at Edwards. The F-16D surges forward, lifts its nose, and climbs steeply while the gear retracts and speed builds past 400 knots in seconds.

Skupien takes the controls for a while and discovers that the side stick reacts like it’s in a whole different league, as even the slightest touch causes it to move. The pair then switch to the low-level route via the Sidewinder route, keeping the jet steady at 500 feet and 500 knots as it swoops and dives over ridges, valleys, and snow-dusted slopes, the radar altimeter and heads-up display working together to keep the jet skimming past the rising terrain. The scenery practically rushes by you as the aircraft remains planted and handles smoothly even when it encounters an elevation change.

Later, Pipe attempts to push the aircraft past commercial levels, up to 50,000 feet, firing up the afterburner until the speed reaches Mach 1.58, or roughly 1300 miles per hour, with only a minor pressure increase through the airframe. He tries it again on the way down, then tests the auto-ground collision avoidance system by lowering the jet’s nose.

The jet takes care of itself, pitching up on its own and recovering smoothly before returning control to the pilot. Just after that, they make a hard left bend that pulls a full nine Gs, and Skupien tightens his mask and grabs hold for real, remaining conscious and seeing the horizon spin around him like a top. The trip ends with a low pass past the tower, followed by a silky smooth landing on the lake bottom runway.

The F-16 is a single-engine multirole fighter that debuted in 1974 as a lightweight design intended to be agile and inexpensive. Because of its relaxed static stability, its airframe is designed to unwind and change direction quickly, and a digital fly-by-wire system is required to keep it under control. On the other hand, the bubble canopy provides the pilot with a 360-degree view of the sky, while the side stick and heads-up display keep all flying data and aiming information visible. This machine only has one engine, often a Pratt & Whitney or General Electric turbofan cranking out over 25,000 pounds of thrust in afterburner, and that’s more than enough to provide a high thrust weight ratio, allowing it to pull off quick climbs and prolonged high G turns.

It’s no surprise that with such a combination of power, responsiveness, and visibility, this one has been flying high for decades and is still in service with dozens of air forces across the world. Even older airframes are still receiving software and weapon upgrades, and the 416th Flight Test Squadron is currently putting the two-seaters through their paces at Edwards to evaluate how they all compare before being assigned to operational units. The F-16 can pull nine Gs, take off from a short runway, mix it up in the air with various missiles and bombs, and still come out swinging in both air-to-air and air-to-ground modes, and as Skupien discovered while flying in the back of one of those test aircraft, the beast was doing exactly what it was designed to do all those years ago.