By 1942 American pilots were flying fighter planes their own bodies could not survive.
P-51s pulling out of high speed dives so violently that gravity drained the blood from pilots' brains.
They lost consciousness at the controls. They crashed.
Then a Canadian doctor invented a suit that saved them.
This is the story of the WW2 G-suit..🧵1/4
🧵 2/4 The problem began in the late 1930s as fighter aircraft became faster and more maneuverable than anything in human history.
When a pilot pulled hard out of a dive or banked into a tight turn the gravitational forces on his body multiplied. At 5 Gs his arms became too heavy to lift.
His vision faded into grey. The colors disappeared. Then his vision tunneled until he could only see the instrument panel directly in front of him.
Then the tunnel collapsed into black. The Royal Air Force called it fainting in the air. Medical researchers called it G induced loss of consciousness.
Pilots simply called it blacking out. The blood was draining from their brains into their lower bodies. By the time they regained consciousness their plane was already in the ocean.
Even the Japanese had noticed the problem. Some Japanese pilots experimented with tight abdominal bindings designed to reduce blood pooling during violent combat maneuvers.
The Allies needed a real solution.
🧵 3/4 A Canadian cancer researcher named Wilbur Franks had been working on a different problem.
He had been trying to keep test tubes from breaking inside high speed centrifuges during cancer research at the University of Toronto.
He had discovered that surrounding the small tubes with water-filled larger tubes prevented them from shattering. He looked at the blacked out pilots and saw the same physics. He sewed together the world's first anti gravity suit on a sewing machine in his office. It used water filled bladders around the legs and abdomen.
When G forces increased the water inside pressed back against the pilot's body and forced blood toward his brain.
In May 1940 Franks climbed into a Fleet Finch aircraft at Camp Borden wearing the suit he had built himself. It was the first time he had ever flown in an airplane. The pilot took them through a series of high G aerobatic maneuvers. During testing the suit allowed Franks to tolerate forces that normally caused blackout in the pilot beside him.
The suit had been cut to fit him standing up. When the pressure hit while he was sitting in the cockpit it nearly cut him in two. He landed jubilant.
In November 1942 the Franks Flying Suit went into combat for the first time with the British Fleet Air Arm flying Supermarine Seafires over the Operation Torch invasion of North Africa.
It was the first anti gravity suit used in combat anywhere in the world.
🧵 4/4
American researchers at the Mayo Clinic refined the design using inflatable air bladders instead of water. By 1944 American pilots flying P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51 Mustangs over Europe were wearing improved G suits during the high speed dives that had been killing them in 1942.
The pilots hated them at first. They were heavy and hot. They restricted movement in the cockpit. But when combat speeds kept increasing the pilots stopped complaining. The suits were keeping them alive.
By the end of the war thousands of Allied pilots had flown combat missions in G suits derived from a Canadian cancer researcher's design that had been sewn together on an old office sewing machine in 1940.
Wilbur Franks was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Britain. The United States gave him the Legion of Merit. He died in 1986.
Today every F-16 pilot. Every F-22 pilot. Every F-35 pilot. Every astronaut. Every Red Bull Air Race competitor. They all wear G suits descended from the design of the Canadian doctor who looked at his cancer test tubes and saw a way to save fighter pilots from blacking out as the blood drained from their brains.
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@UntoldWarStories via X
