Great unknowns

Do fighter pilots puke? How deep can we dig into the earth?

Do fighter pilots ever puke during a dogfight?

IT’S TOUGH TO PROVE A NEGATIVE – and, believe us, chundering in the cockpit just as some belligerent MIG jockey tries to sneak a missile up your tailpipe is a big negative. But generally speaking, the answer is no.

Would-be pilots with weak stomachs don’t tend to make it through training. In fact, retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Craig “Quizmo” Brown, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm who has flown F-111s and F-15ES and taught budding aces for six years, says that as many as 30 per cent of the students in his class “washed out” of flight school due to an inability to overcome motion sickness. Today, thanks to better screening of trainees, that’s down to about 10 per cent. Brown himself threw up on his first official Air Force jet ride.

Instructors, guided by flight surgeons, have developed a few approaches to calming queasy recruits. For one, it helps to let the student pilot fly the airplane as much as possible, as opposed to operating in ride-along mode. Just as drivers are far less likely to suffer carsickness than passengers, the man or woman behind the stick, who must focus on the horizon and who is in a better position to anticipate motion, can more readily avoid nausea. Also, in the same way it helps to roll down the window in a car or to head to the deck on a boat, fresh, cool air can help motion-sick pilots. “Keep the cockpit as cold as possible,” advises Brown. “Get some air on your face, wrists, areas of your body that are your thermostats.”

Still, in the end, not every stomach is steely enough for the demands of dogfighting. And speaking of washing out, that responsibility is on you if you do lose your lunch aloft. “I’ve seen people throw up in their gloves,” says Brown. “I’ve seen people throw up in the oxygen mask and it just sprays out both sides. That’s always lovely. You name it, we’ve seen it. But the standing rule is that if you mess it, you clean it.”

How deep a hole in the Earth could humans actually dig?

While there seems to be a certain presidential candidate with a notorious Twitter account who is determined to find out, scientists could save him some trouble – the present limits are more or less known.

First, bear in mind that there are two ways to think about the “depth” of a hole. One is a straight measurement; the other looks at it in terms of how far towards the centre of the Earth you can get before heat and pressure make further gains impossible. The latter is the limiting factor, as the linear depth of the hole varies depending on whether you drill from the planet’s surface or from the ocean floor, which affords you a bit of a head start on your journey towards the centre of the Earth.

That said, the deepest hole ever dug in the conventional sense is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, drilled by the Russians between 1970 and 1994. Extending to a depth of 12 kilometres, the hole eventually was thwarted by underground heat and aboveground funding shortfalls. Scientists say that with current technology (plus some savvy engineering and about R15 billion), we should be able to get down about fifteen kilometres deeper than that – to a spot known as the Moho (short for Mohorovicic discontinuity). There, the Earth’s lower crust meets its upper mantle layer. But that’s about the limit, as heat and pressure at that depth would give the earth the consistency of goopy molten plastic and make further drilling a messy, frustrating affair. The Chinese, it seems, can rest easy – Bugs Bunny is unlikely to pop up unannounced in Tiananmen Square.

Do thieves still hot-wire cars?

Only in Hollywood – much to the consternation of those who know better. “Every time I watch a TV show where they rip the wires out from under the dash and put a couple together and it starts, I cringe,” says Mike Calkins, technical services manager for the USA’S Automobile Association. “That hasn’t been possible since the 1960s.”

There have been a few intervening fixes for the “twist and start” theft, but nowadays the issue is that thieves typically have to contend with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology embedded in high-tech keys or associated fobs. If the car doesn’t sense the key’s unique code, the engine won’t crank, no matter how many wires a crook may fish from under the dash and braid together.

Of course, the fact that about 700 000 cars are still stolen annually suggests there may be, you know, work-arounds. One is the obvious: drivers who, God bless their trusting souls, leave their keys in the car and perhaps even leave it running while they pop into the Woolies food store for a quick errand that’s destined to turn into a long afternoon. And there’s always carjacking, but where’s the challenge in that? Another low-tech but reliable approach is the old fake-tow ruse, in which a uniformed lowlife simply winches an ostensibly disabled but highly coveted ride on to the back of a flatbed and drives off with it. Issues with RFIDS are solved later, once the car is halfway around the world. (High-end stolen cars may be in shipping containers headed offshore within hours of their disappearance.) Criminals can also pick up RFID codes remotely using scanners, and, with the help of unscrupulous locksmiths or car dealers, replicate keys in advance.