Retiring The Air Force's Centrifuge, Then Building Another

The particular centrifuge you see in the image below this sentence is the only US Air Force-owned human centrifuge used for aircrew training since it was certified for use in 1988. It is housed at the Physiological Training Center at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico and has been since it's inception. On November 2nd, 2010, it spun it's last spin. The very last rider of this amusement park ride from heck was Capt. George Cannon, the 48th Operations Support Squadron Tactics Division chief from Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, who pulled 9 Gz in prep for his assignment as an F-22 pilot at Langley AFB, Virginia.

Cannon has the following to say about his historic final spin: "It's a pretty cool feeling, ...This centrifuge has a lot of history so it was a pretty cool thing to be the last person to go through, but I'm sure the new one they're building at Wright-Patterson (AFB) will be even better." At Cannon's spin, almost 32,000 students had been spun as training for flight.

The new centrifuge Cannon speaks of will be built in Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, where also due to the Department of Defense's Base Realignment and Closure of 2005, there will be a consolidation of fighter acceleration training and aerospace medicine research. This new centrifuge will be completed by 2012, but until then, flight students will be using a contractor's centrifuge already in operation in Brooks City-Base, Texas. Keep on spinnin.

[Via US Air Force]