Up!
In February I booked in for a joyflight. It was a present from the girls soccer team for having the pleasure of coaching for another year. Win-win I say. I knew nothing of the details of the impending flight - plane, duration, style - but was still beside myself with excitement. It turns out I wasn't to be disappointed.
The plane was a Pitts Special biplane. 650kg, stiff, open cockpit, stupid amount of power. Delicate and fierce. Gorgeous.
From go to whoa the experience was an enormous thrill. Despite my brimming anticipation, my expectations were exceeded. I was just excited to be in the plane, strapped loosely over the shoulders into a rough cushion, partially cocooned by the fuselage and peering out over the imposing engine.
The pilot cranked the prop into life and my world began to shake. As the prop blurred almost into invisibility and began to push a gale over the plane, my eyes darted from sky to wing to instrument panel, desperately trying not to miss a thing.
After gaining a crackled clearance over the crackly radio we grumbled and skipped down the runway. All the time the plane rolled on the tail gear wheel, leaving only a view of the sky out over the front of the plane, tantalisingly restricting any opportunity to spot our route. The grassy edges of the runway equidistant out the sides of the plane were the only navigational aids.
Soon we rounded out at the end of the runway and I gave my pilot a reprieve from incessant questioning to execute the take off. The engine pitch ramped up, the gale turned to a ferocious deluge of air and our meandering taxiing was replaced by an unrelenting surge of determined acceleration. In seconds the wings, which had calmly come along for the ride so far, stiffened and took charge. In frighteningly short time, the tail wing rose to attention, lifting the rear of the plane to level the fuselage, and for the first time since sinking into the cockpit the world in front of the plane came into view.
There was scarcely time to digest the explosion of wonder born by the new horizontal perspective before we separated from the runway. It was nothing short of magical the way this little rocket could blast off the ground like it was hitching a ride on an elevator. But there was no elevator, no suspension, no heavily engineered lifting rig. Just a tremendous impulse of aerodynamics and in a flash we were floating around above the runway. I'm tingling just writing about it.
With the runway slipping away below us, along with the means of reference I had relied on for 28 years, there was an uncanny moment when I lost the sensation of propulsion. It seemed we were suspended in space, some indeterminate distance above the trees and houses below. That's when the rickety airspeed indicator in front of me became more apparent. I actually stuck my hand above the perspex windshield to confirm that yes, there really was a wall of air blasting over the plane at 250 knots.
The other thing that gave our speed away was the ease in which the pilot slipped into a 4g spin. My arms turned to sacks of bricks as I experimented with the new acutely gravitational world, but still the Earth below us just seemed to calmly rotate on the spot. With each aerobatic move the pilot checked for my response through the barely audible headphones. My giddy affirmations of enjoyment must have been enough to allay any reservations and we steadily progressed to the vertical climb manoeuvre.
The pilot dipped the nose to the ground to pick up some terrifying airspeed, then, with the wind reaching a crescendo and the wings bursting with bridled potential, smoothly reversed the dive to point us at the sky. He crackled over the radio, "Look out over the left wing. Notice the horizon? Close enough to vertical ay?". And so it was. I was so comfortable, lightly coupled to a rickety old seat and feeling cordial with the plane despite the precarious circumstances, that it took a double and triple look to realise that out over the left wing the horizon was indeed perfectly perpendicular to the plane.
Even landing was a blast. With zero visibility out the front of the plane the pilot has to wrestle the plane in sideways to grab a view of the landing strip before cutting the power, plummeting the last 50 metres, and bouncing the plane down the runway to we restore the relationship with terra firma.
The whole experience was no less than a blow-my-socks-off highlight of my life so far.