The Dragonfly Suit.(anti-gravity pilot suit, Libelle)

American F-16 fighter planes and Soviet-built MiG-29s will scream through the skies of Nevada next month in a furious series of supersonic dogfights. It won't be the first time. In previous Red Flag exercises in the skies above Nellis Air Force Base, America's top guns have almost always had the technological edge. This time when the planes go into the wild high-speed twists and turns of close combat, things may be different. It's not that the MiGs have gotten better, or that the German Luftwaffe pilots who will be flying them are any more skilled than the Americans. The difference will be purely sartorial: the German pilots will be wearing better outfits.

"It's like magic," says one envious American pilot who's tested the new suits. They could also be, quite literally, lifesavers. Pilots say they are better than traditional gear in counteracting the dangerous gravitational forces that handicap them in supersonic combat and sometimes cause them to black out during training. But bureaucratic forces could keep NATO pilots from getting them. The problem: the new suits were developed by a Swiss inventor. They are also radically different from technology in which the Pentagon and Europe's military bureaucracies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars. Will powerful NATO air forces opt for a Swiss solution to the vexing problem of gravity's effects on the pilots' bodies?

Humans are an aircraft's most fragile component. As a plane plunges and rolls, passengers feel a sudden multiplication of gravity, or G's, from the centrifugal forces. It's like a neck-snapping theme-park ride. But the most rip-roaring state-of-the-art roller coaster ever made, generating maybe twice the force of normal gravity, never comes close to what riding a fighter plane feels like. The dangers posed by high-G forces first became evident in the 1930s with the development of the Germans' Stuka dive bomber, and the effects have become more pronounced and dangerous with every new generation of faster, more agile hardware. As a plane maneuvers at high speed, banking into tight turns, centrifugal force causes blood to flow from the pilot's brain to his seat and feet, and he blacks out. The condition is called G-LOC (for gravity-induced loss of consciousness). If the G's rise fairly slowly, say half a G per second, the symptoms come on slowly and predictably: impaired vision, then blackout at about four G's. After recovery, the pilot often feels euphoric and disoriented for a while. If he's lucky, the blackout is temporary. If not, he's dead. In the newest generation of combat aircraft, the G's multiply so fast there's no time for warning symptoms. When American F-22s or Eurofighters maneuver as radically as they were designed to do, they can generate 10 G's--10 times the Earth's gravitational pull--in about half a second.

What's to protect the pilot against the tremendous force of ultramodern fighters? An "anti-G suit" that hasn't changed much since World War II. When the G's begin to build, an elaborate system of pneumatic valves and pumps fills the pilot's suit with air, squeezing his lower body enough to keep the blood up in his head. In films of these suits in action, pilots look as if they're being crushed by rubber bladders. "Flying in a normal suit is painful," says Luftwaffe Maj. Georg Pepperl. To illustrate, he holds out his forearms to show dozens of swellings where the old suits have ruptured his blood vessels. "G measles," he says.

Modern high-performance craft also have special breathing masks that pump pressurized air into a pilot's lungs. These require the pilot to follow an arduous breathing routine called an Anti-Gravity-Strain Maneuver, or AGSM. "You have to stay on top of it," says Col. Hank Morrow of the Texas Air National Guard, who has been flying F-16s for 19 years. "You have to grunt and breathe and strain." The experience is exhausting for the flier. Combat efficiency drops off dramatically because he has to endure both the G's and the G suit. It becomes difficult to control the craft and virtually impossible to talk. Worse, these conventional pneumatic suits only barely keep up with rapid buildup of G's. Over the last two decades, several F-16 crashes and near crashes have been attributed to G-LOC. The Pentagon usually faults the pilots for failing to perform their AGSM properly.

Andreas Reinhard, a 45-year-old former pilot in the Swiss Air Force, has spent 13 years and millions of dollars in venture capital developing a G suit that operates in a completely different way. He calls it the Libelle, the German word for dragonfly, because it's based on the same principles that protect a dragonfly's innards from the 30-G accelerations the insect generates in flight. A dragonfly's vital organs are encased in liquid. When blood rushes to one side of its body, so does the liquid, providing a counterpressure. Even in the days of the Stuka, engineers ...