MERIGNAC, France (AP) - A French medical team hailed as a success pioneering surgery Wednesday on a man in near zero-gravity conditions on a flight looping in the air like a roller coaster to mimic weightlessness. The five-man team of doctors and a patient landed safely at an airport in southwest France after a three-hour flight, but the mid-air surgery to remove a cyst from the man's arm took only about 10 minutes.
Chief surgeon Dominique Martin said the near zero-gravity operation, the first ever on a human, was not technically difficult, but was aimed at breaking a barrier in medical expertise.
The surgery went "exactly as we had expected," Martin told reporters near Merignac airport, outside Bordeaux. "All the data we collected allow us to think that operating on a human in the conditions of space would not present insurmountable problems."
The medical team was strapped down to the walls of the Airbus 300 Zero-G plane as it looped up and down in a total of 25 roller coaster- like maneuvers, called parabolas. Each dive, creating conditions close to weightlessness, lasted 22 seconds—and the doctors operated during those intervals only.
