My dad had all these flying buddies, and one of them had a stunt plane. I want to say it was a Luscombe, somewhat similar to the one in this image, but it was a real stunt plane in that it had a pressurized oil system so that the plane could fly inverted for extended periods without losing oil to the engine.
I was 10 or 11. In my teens I flew in several different planes, but I think my first flight ever was in the stunt plane. Way to get broken-in, right? Actually I may have flown in the glider first, but even that was gnarly. You'd get towed to about 3,000' by a tow plane and then the cable would be released and you'd catch thermals and rise to around 10,000'. Gliding is mostly done in Summer so you can catch thermals, so the pilot left the canopy off. You'd have your elbow hanging over the side like you were in a Jeep or something, only you were at 10,000'.
Since there was no engine, the only sound was the wind. Pilots will look for hawks and other birds catching thermals and head in that direction. The way it works is simple. The pilot puts the plane into a tightly-banked spiral turn. The warm rising air exerts more lift on whichever wing is pointing down, and as long as the plane is kept in a corkscrew turn it will naturally rise. When you get to the desired height you can fly level, but you'll slowly lose altitude, and have to catch another thermal if you want to stay aloft.
Theoretically you could fly coast-to-coast without landing and without an engine, as long as you could find enough thermals along the way. We'd stay in the air for a couple hours usually, and we caught thermals and repeated the spiral thing several times. What's cool is the same way pilots look for birds catching thermals, birds look for planes too. Many times we'd be flying and various birds would head our way and park just off the wingtips and fly along with us, like an escort. That was cool.
I'm almost positive that the stunt plane was my first flight though. Just because it's a stunt plane doesn't mean of course that it has to do stunts, and the pilot flew it normally at first, with maybe a few tight turns, I guess to make sure I wasn't going to erf all over the interior of his plane. When he knew I was cool he let it rip. All I can say is that since then there's never been a single ride at the fair or Disneyworld or Six Flags or anywhere else that can faze me.
I can't remember every stunt he did, other than in general flying the plane like most aren't meant to fly, but a few stand out. He started with the traditional loop-de-loop, which was a thrill, but that was nothing. He was flying level, but then he whipped the plane over into a half-rotation, and all of the sudden we were flying upside-down. I just started laughing. That was interesting.
The coolest thing to me was the "falling leaf" thing or whatever it was. He went into a steep 45-degree bank, held it in that position and cut the engine. The plane flew straight for a bit but then it started falling, except that he was making the plane swoop back and forth in an upward arc while falling, just like a leaf. I didn't know a plane could do that.
But the most adrenaline-producing stunt, and what almost gave my poor mom a heart attack...I don't know if it was called anything, was when he pointed the plane straight up and took off like a rocket. He cut the engine, and the plane continued up for a few seconds, but then it came to a complete stop, pointing straight up, in midair. For a second or two we experienced zero gravity, which was a thrill.
But that was just the going up part. The plane flopped over and started heading nose-first toward the ground, and for extra kicks he put it into a tight "death spiral." Oh, and the engine was still off. He restarted the plane in plenty of time but kept diving, with the engine roaring just like in the movies, and then at around 1,000' feet or so he pulled out of the dive.
As much as it thrilled me and set off every chemical my brain could release, it wasn't quite so much fun for my mom. She's never been one to panic very often, but bless her heart that particular stunt almost made her swoon, according to reports from the ground. I could see her clearly, and I could tell from way up that she didn't look happy, but there wasn't anything I could do about it, and I wasn't about to tell him to quit. The problem was that she thought he'd lost control of the plane, and that we were about to crash.
Bless her ding-dang heart: I can understand. It certainly felt authentic from inside the plane, so I can imagine what it looked like from the ground. Too bad nobody filmed it. I knew that even if the engine didn't restart, and the plane was designed for that not to happen, it could still be flown and landed like a glider so I wasn't worried at all, but mom almost had an event.
I've always thought that as brutal as it was for her, and if I'd known how much she'd be traumatized, and how crazy the stunts would be, I'd have told her not to come, it was a good thing in the long run. I think it probably desensitized her just a bit to the stunts I'd pull on the ground in later years. You also have to consider I guess, that being on the ground and being 10,000' in the air are two different things. In any case she was banned from all future stunt plane flights, as if she'd have wanted to go. I'm glad she didn't have to see me crash.
As far as I was concerned, flying several times in the stunt plane as a kid no doubt increased my fearlessness a tad, and probably contributed to my being a Type-A adventure-seeker. As far as my mom was concerned, it took a Coke on ice and several people fanning her and supporting her on each side to keep her vertical. For me it was both chills and thrills, but for her I guess it was just chills. Sorry about that mom, but it was for your own good.
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