Air Zero-G flying high

Parabolic flights provide a low-gravity environment by flying an aircraft over a curved trajectory called a parabola. After a heavy pull-up, the pilots inject the aircraft onto the parabolic curve. As the plane slows down, reaches its apex and falls back down, everything inside is in free fall and experiences weightlessness relative to the plane, similar to the sensation you get at the top of a rollercoaster. This short period of weightlessness lasts about 22 seconds, during which people and experiments on board the parabolic flight can experience the same weightlessness as astronauts in orbit on the International Space Station.

The price to pay for this free-floating freedom is two short periods of hypergravity during which everything weighs almost double for 20 seconds: first when the aircraft pulls up sharply to reach the weightless curve and then again when it pulls out sharply afterwards to return to a normal flight path.

Each parabola takes about one minute to complete and is repeated 31 times in one flight, providing a total of about ten minutes of zero-gravity. A typical parabolic flight campaign consists of three flights, giving about 30 minutes of weightlessness over 93 parabolas.

ESA has been conducting parabolic flights since the 1980s under a contract with Novespace and their dedicated aircraft, today the A310 Zero-G, to perform at least two campaigns per year. The flights provide European scientists with access to a repeatable, low-gravity research environment. Hundreds of experiments have flown over thousands of parabolas, enabling extensive scientific endeavours across many disciplines and resulting in a huge legacy of publications.