"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

feet continuously; the symptoms were rapid tiredness, which could lead to
mistakes. Hypoxia didn't affect people in the sports world because they took
little oxygen bottles up with them, but it was the R.A.F's ball, and we had
to play by their rules.
We went afterward to R.A.F Luffingham, the R.A.F medical center, for
chest X rays and lectures about the sins and symptoms of h poxia and what
would happen if our teeth were not in good condition. A small air pocket in
a filling would expand with altitude, until finally the tooth exploded.
I saw it happ,-n twice to other people, and it was nasty. Stomach gases
also expanded as we climbed in an unpressurized aircraft, so we farted
continuously. I'd have taken the exploding tooth any day.
We then spent time in a decompression chamber, doing exactly the
opposite of what divers do, gradually being starved of oxygen. We sat there
chatting away and were asked to do our ten tim&s table and draw pictures of
pigs and elephants. My elephants were outrageous, with disproportionately
big eyes. Then, as the chamber drained of oxygen, my ten times table went to
ratshit; I felt myself getting slow and lethargic. The moment I was allowed
to put my mask back on and take a breath, it all came good again. Apart from
the elephant; the monster with big eyes was the best I could do under any
conditions.
We would have to go to R.A.F Luffingham once a year for the rest of our
careers in order to keep our free fall qualification. Every year we would
have to go through the same lecture, have another set of chest X rays, and
have our ears checked; if we couldn't clear the pressure in our ears, we'd
be heading for major dramas.
The culmination of the course was everybody leaping out at night, with
full equipment, from over twenty-five grand. We jumped together and landed
together, and that was us qualified as free fallers-until we got to the
squadrons and had to retrain completely with square rigs.
It was madness not to be training with the equipment we were going to
use. Crazier still that in a few days with my troop I was to learn more than
I had in six weeks with the R.A.F; you learn what life's all about when you
have oxygen equipment, radios, and a GPMG strapped to your bergen, packed
out to the brim with an excess of one hundred pounds of kit. You might also
be bringing in ammunition for the squadron; there might be mortar bombs
strapped on to you, a mortar baseplate, all sorts wrapped all over you.
Basically, you can't move for the amount of equipment that you have on, and
you can't do much in the air. You fall, try to keep yourself stable, and
work like a man possessed to keep in a group.
Members of Air Troop were starting to practice BABO (high altitude,
high opening) instead of HALO (high altitude, low opening).
Free falling at night was dangerous and required an aircraft to fly
near the target.
When parachutes are deployed close to the ground, the loud, telltale
crack of an opening canopy can alert the very people you're trying to jump
on. Using this new technique, they could land accurately from an aircraft
flying at high altitude anything up to fifty miles from the target. jumping
from a commercial airliner at forty thousand feet and immediately opening
their rigs, they could use a square canopy fitted with an electronic device
to guide them to within fifty meters of a beacon placed on target, even in