Breaking the bonds of the Earth – experiencing true weightlessness

There is an old phrase, a mantra (if you will), that athletes sometimes employ. “Be the ball! Be the ball!” It is meant to curve attention to a focal point, to get the athlete to concentrate. When it comes to the Zero-G weightless experience, it takes on an entirely different meaning. Teammates stand next to bulkheads of the 727-200 and another member of the team hugs knees to chest and is passed around, like a ball.

We never got to that point. The rest of the experience seemed all too brief and each passenger of the 130th flight of the Zero-G plane took every precious second to float, spin, twist, crawl along ceilings and relish the experience.

NCsoft organized the adventure for some of the attendees of the Tabula Rasa event in Austin Wednesday night. Thursday morning, approximately 30 passengers arrived at the Signature hangar and were processed for the flight, which took almost two hours. The processing including issuing flight suits and jump bags, taking a strong prescription motion-sickness pill, and watching a film that was about 30 minutes in length. The film was designed as a briefing and before tickets were issued for the seats.

The rules were simple. Don’t jump, don’t swim, don’t kick your legs, obey the flight crew at all times. There was good reason. In order to pull off weightlessness, the plane had to perform parabolic maneuvers, and that would also mean that while true weightlessness would be achieved, passengers would also experience gravity that was close to twice that on Earth.

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