French astronaut Philippe Perrin floating in the Airbus 300. There are no seats in the plane's experiment zone, but barf bags are standard personal equipment.
Please, no Bordeaux
Passengers are routinely warned to "avoid Bordeaux wines and heavy French gastronomy," says Alain Legendre, flying safety chief officer. "And don't hesitate to use the paper bag if an emergency strikes." There's no choice, as there are not rest rooms on board. The last chance was before leaving the Bordeaux airport.
Sixty seconds later, the world's largest zero-gravity aircraft goes into a steep climb. The force of the maneuver pushes the passengers against the padded floor, almost doubling their weight.
French astronaut and test pilot Philippe Perrin in the cockpit pulls back on the stick until the plane is at a steep 52-degree angle with the horizon. The six cockpit windows are filled with dark blue of the clear sky. The powerful jet engines are at maximum thrust.
Suddenly, as the commander announces "injection" over the loudspeakers, the engines are throttled back to almost zero, injecting the aircraft into a parabola. The plane reaches the crest of the parabola at 26,000 feet (7,925 meters), then starts descending.
For the next 20 to 25 seconds, the plane's engine stops its loud humming and the passengers float weightlessly as the aircraft free-falls.
Tumbling through gym class
Everything is floating away as my own body becomes weightless and incapable of holding me stationary. There's no vertical, no horizontal, no up or down and no sense of falling.
And thank my lucky stars, no one appears to have an urge to find a paper bag in his jumpsuit leg pocket. I feel like a kid tumbling through gym class without ever touching the mat.
Around me in the large white, cabin, everyone lays down on the inch-thick non-flammable padding that covers the entire central section of the craft where scientific instruments are tightly screwed to the floor.
25 precious seconds
The 30 scientists aboard, in their blue fireproof jumpsuits, tumble just like me if they don't hold on firmly to a handrail or strap themselves down. They try hard not to drift away from their experiments. Their goal is to record a maximum data for about 25 precious seconds while the plane and everything aboard goes into a free-fall describing a parabolic trajectory.
"We follow the curve just like a ball being thrown upwards," says Perrin, who has flown parabolic flights on NASA's KC 135 "vomit comet" in Houston where he trains as an astronaut for the French space agency, CNES.
Aboard this flight, the 28th parabolic flight campaign organized by ESA, 11 teams of European researchers try to work on scientific experiments they want to conduct on board small experimental rockets and, later, the International Space Station.
"It's a perfect gravity-free environment to fine-tune our experiment and to get science data in real time," says Jean-Michel Beuken, scientist at the Belgium University of Louvain. His work is to investigate the synthesis of new forms of carbon, including artificial micro-diamonds, by applying a strong electric discharge between two graphite electrodes.
"We got very good initial results, and to enjoy at the same time the exhilarating physical experience of microgravity, we conceived an automatic procedure for our experiment. We loved each parabola!" says Beuken.
Motion sickness
But for some, the happy ride is not fun at all. A certain percentage suffer badly from motion sickness like the astronauts.
"It's a perception conflict between visual representation and physical stimulus, during the flight" explains Jean-Michel Clere, chief doctor at the French aerospace medical lab for test flights.
"I recommend to all the riders to take Cyclizine, which is an efficient anti-motion-sickness medicine, but I also strongly advise [you] not to move your head during the acceleration phases.
Although you can't feel the 8,000-foot (2,440-meter) plunge, the plane takes a 45-degree nosedive which pushes down with 1.8 times the force of Earth's gravity.
There are no windows to provide a reference to the horizon.
After 20 seconds, the jet bottoms out around 20,000 feet (6.095 meters) as it resumes its steady horizontal flight. But there's little time to think about your next meal. The next parabola comes in two minutes.
Airbus versus KC 135
The intervals between parabolas are what distinguishes the French from the U.S. vomit comets.
"These intervals are very useful to recover and make our job easier," says Angelika Diefenbach, German physicist of the German space agency DLR who has flown several parabolic NASA campaigns. Most of the scientists prefer to fly the Airbus because the KC 135's uninterrupted parabolic trajectory on the NASA flights doesn't give them the time to adjust their experiments.
With Europe and its international partners now building the International Space Station, where research will be carried out for the next 15 years, parabolic flights are crucial to the preparation of experiments, equipment and astronauts.
In the next four years, the ESA will conduct two parabolic campaigns a year, run by Novespace -- a private firm authorized to fly parabolic flights only for science purposes. Scientists are regularly invited to submit experiment proposals for review by peers who select the ones to participate in an ESA parabolic flight campaign.
The 27 previous campaigns that ESA conducted since 1984 have produced a total of more than 2,650 parabolas and almost 15 hours of weightlessness -- the equivalent of flying around Earth nearly 10 times. A total of 360 experiments have been carried out so far.
Today, after a three-day campaign with 30 parabolas per flight, we all have spent a total of 30 minutes of space-like weightlessness before returning to Bordeaux-Merignac airport.
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