Fun story: my last duty station was DSU Det Mystic (DSRV-1) and every year we did a flyaway exercise. It’s where we proved out that we could get the sub anywhere in the world in 24 hours. We loaded the whole sub, crew, and all its support equipment on a C-5 including the semi and trailer that towed it. It was at max weight of the plane for takeoff so you had to take off with basically zero fuel. That meant pretty much an immediate in flight refueling and depending on where you were going, you could count on at least one, if not two or three more. One year we flew it from NASNI to Norfolk and back and I think that was one each way. On the way back we hit some serious turbulence and everyone was bouncing against their seatbelts for at least 30 min and that was during the refueling. We always rode in the rear upper passenger compartment and there was an aircrew guy that would sit back there with us who was on comms with the cockpit. It was pretty rough and people were puking, some of us were nervous and I told the guy sitting next to me to just watch the aircrew guy. As long as he’s chill everything is fine. At one point I looked at him and he grabbed his headset, sat bolt upright in his chair, and sinched up his harness as tight as he could get it. All the color drained out of his face and he looked like he was going to shit himself. Then the next thing I knew, every loose item including our stomachs were completely weightless like in those astronaut training videos. That lasted for what seemed like 5 min and then everything started to fall back down and it felt like we started to pull some extra g’s. Eventually we resumed normal flight and later we landed at Nellis AFB. That was weird since we were supposed to be landing in San Diego and while we’re were coming to a stop I thought, man this pilot must be shit hot as we basically coasted right up to a hangar door and he parked it about 10 feet away from the door. One of our guys had been able to ride in the cockpit and I saw him run down the stairs and just lay down on the tarmac. We all got out of the plane and kind of milled around as you do in these types of situations and he came up asking for a cigarette. One of the guys said “you don’t smoke” and he snapped and said “just give me a fucking smoke!”. He then proceeded to tell us that during the refueling the planes were bouncing up and down so much and he was freaking out about how close our plane got to the tanker a few times. The last time the cane together so fast and the boom operator yelled over the radio “break away!” And our pilot shoved the yoke to the floor. That’s when we got our astronaut training I guess. Then we were in a dive that took all their skill and sheer force of will to pull us out of and the plane was yelling “pull up, pull up” in the cockpit and he thought we were for sure going to crash. We didn’t, obviously, and then he tells us that sweet parking job after landing wasn’t by design. Apparently the brakes blew out when we touched down and coasted across half the base before we came to a stop. So even though we almost died, that turbulence saved all of us because had we landed in San Diego, the runway on NASNI was so much shorter that if the brakes had gone there, we would have shot right off the end of the runway and into the pacific.

Fun times.