A declassified Air Force video from May of this year shows the moments after an Arizona Air National Guard pilot on a training flight passed out during a high-speed turn. He was rendered unconscious by forces that exceeded eight times the Earth's gravity. His F-16 fighter dove at a 55 degree angle toward the ground at 587 knots (about 675 miles per hour) with full afterburner engaged.

But the video has a happy ending.

While an instructor in another plane shouted for him to recover, the aircraft's Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System (Auto-GCAS) kicked in. The system pulled the plane back up and into level flight. The F-16 recovered itself from the dive in under 30 seconds.

Aviation Week reports this as the fourth confirmed rescue by an Auto-GCAS system since newer aircraft in the F-16 fleet (Block 40 and Block 50) began being retrofitted with the system in September 2014. The first aircraft to be "saved" by Auto-GCAS was an F-16 flying over Syria in 2015.

Although Auto-GCAS was developed nearly 30 years ago by Lockheed Martin in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA, it didn't come out of research and development until 2010. Before the Auto-GCAS system, the Air Force lost four or five aircraft per year to what is called "controlled flight into terrain" (CFIT)—misjudgments by pilots that caused them to fly into mountains or other terrain. The military is looking into ways to add Auto-GCAS to older F-16s, which have analog control systems.

Listing image by stefano benedetto @ Flickr