On May 6, 2023, Air Force Captain Trent Meisel had just begun his deployment to South Korea when some minor malfunctions seemed to mount with his F-16. He was about 70 miles from the demilitarized zone and flying in the clouds. The plane’s instruments were not working properly. He struggled to regain control.
Flying a fighter jet in the clouds can produce a kind of vertigo. Emotions flood a pilot’s brain, making it difficult to tell what’s up and what’s down. In aviation circles, this is called spatial disorientation. With the instruments not working properly, Meisel wasn’t sure how his jet was oriented to the earth below.
Suddenly he burst out of the clouds, the F-16’s nose pointing down at a 40-degree angle. He tried to pull the nose up. Unsuccessful. His brain calculated Mach speed. Altitude 720 feet, speed 400 miles per hour. No time to pull up. Instinct.
Pull the eject handle.
“What happened next can only be described as the definition of violence,” he said later.
Collins Aerospace manufactures the same ejection seat that saved the life of Air Force Captain Trent Meisel in South Korea in 2023. The company is testing the seat using special equipment.
Ejection seats hurl pilots from their planes with a force 20 times greater than gravity. About 10 percent of those who eject die, and about 30 percent suffer spinal damage or other serious injuries. Then the gust of wind hits.
“Just total chaos in every part of your body,” recalls Meisel, 29. “Imagine sticking your hand out the window while driving 70 miles per hour on the highway, and then doing that at 400 miles per hour.”
Ejection seats have straps that automatically tighten the pilot’s limbs so they don’t get torn off. Even so, the gust of wind ripped Meisel’s left pectoral muscle apart, leaving a deep cave in his chest. He looked up. His parachute was fine. Then an explosion below him. His jet had created a huge fireball a few hundred yards away.
A surveillance camera recorded the entire sequence: the ejection, the explosion, Meisel floating toward the fire. All in a few seconds.
Meisel managed to land in a muddy rice field about 137 meters from the wreckage. Some local farmers approached him. Their English was not good. Meisel feared that his jet had hit a house and injured someone. Someone with better English came by and told him that no one was injured.
Meisel walked through the mud toward the smoldering crater. All the twisted and charred fragments around him were part of something he had flown just minutes before. He began to grasp the enormity of what had happened, a sense of loss and fear.
And then he heard the unique whistle of another fighter jet, an Air Force A-10. The pilot circled low and tilted his wings, a pilot’s universal signal that he is not alone.
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Meisel grew up in Lawton, Oklahoma, near Sheppard Air Force Base. He often saw the base’s fighter jets. In ninth grade, something clicked and he decided he wanted to fly in one of them. He was selected to attend the Air Force Academy and eventually flew F-16s.
But when he called his fiancée after the crash, he told her he didn’t know if he would ever fly again.
Meisel was one of the lucky ones to escape. An F-16 pilot from Shaw Air Force Base near Sumter parachuted to safety in 2020 but died when his parachute failed to open. His family’s lawyers are suing him after investigations revealed a counterfeit part may have been the cause.
But Meisel’s ejection seat had worked. His spine was not compressed and he did not have a concussion. Nevertheless, his back and chest hurt and “the next day I felt like I had been hit by a truck. I had black and blue marks the size of basketballs all over my body.”
And he soon realized that the psychological consequences hit him harder than the physical ones. He felt a mixture of fear and worry, coupled with moments of deep gratitude.
The decision to eject himself? He wouldn’t have been able to do it so quickly if the trainers in the simulator hadn’t presented him with one scenario after another.
Other pilots came forward, including some who had ejected. “We had difficult conversations about the good days and the bad, and courage is contagious,” Meisel said. “I wouldn’t have found the courage I needed if people hadn’t taken the time to show me their courage.”
A therapist who was working in Korea at the time cleared his schedule and worked with him for a week.
“I didn’t really understand the toll it was taking on me,” he said. Therapy gave him a new perspective on “what was going on in my brain.”
About a month after his expulsion, Meisel awoke with a feeling of unusual clarity.
“I felt like God had a plan for me.”
He was an avid hunter and thought he could use his passion for hunting to help other veterinarians.
He founded a nonprofit called 4th Gen Hunting Co., a group that supports veterans through hunting experiences. The group plans to sponsor hunts for veterans in need and make videos to bridge the gap between military members and civilians. On a higher level, he hopes to show that “bad things happen, but they don’t necessarily have to lead to bad outcomes.”
Six weeks after his ejection, his squadron was in Fairbanks, Alaska, on a live-fire training exercise at a bombing range. His pilots and instructors had monitored his progress and urged him to get back in the cockpit, pushing him harder than he probably would have done himself – before the fear took hold.
However, if he were to fly the mission in Alaska, he would carry two 500-pound bombs and fire 20mm shells from the aircraft’s cannon.
The clouds hung low, like the day he catapulted himself out of the plane.
According to his Garmin, his heart rate was about 140 beats per minute.
He climbed the ladder into the cockpit. He took off. No problem. He dropped the bombs and fired the weapon. Check. But the clouds were low as he descended. Here we go again, he thought.
So many people had helped him – the therapist, his family, the A-10 pilot who had circled after his crash.
He raced through the clouds toward the runway, and when he turned his head, his instructor was close to his wing.
