Sky Combat Ace

"You are the one that holds the control stick, that maneuvers this incredibly agile carbon fiber-constructed machine as it cuts through the skies at hundreds of miles per hour."

We’re currently 3,500 feet above Malibu and climbing vertiginously, shooting straight into the sky at 300 mph. The blood is quickly leaving my frontal lobe and draining to my cerebellum. My stomach, conversely, has decided to KO its duties and leapfrog my esophagus in its digestive tract positioning. Everything in front of my eyes, which is to say the sun and the clear California stratosphere, is brilliant blue. I think I’m gonna pass out.

Then, the single Lycoming six-cylinder engine on our Extra 330 LC plane slows to an idle. The bassy thrum in our cabin quiets. Everything goes silent. “OK, we’re gonna twist over to the left. When you see the horizon pass by and we’re headed straight down, wait for my command and get ready to pull back on the flight stick,” a voice says calmly over my earpiece.

For a moment I think it’s God offering me one final path to salvation. Then from the foggy depths of my bloated cerebellum I recognize it as the voice of instructor Richard “Tex” Coe crackling over the intercom, and I realize this has nothing to do with God. In fact, after getting to know the retired fighter pilot a little bit, I think it might have a lot more to do with his brimstone and fire-infused archangel. And then it happens exactly as Tex describes. I tighten my grip on the joystick-like controller and push it gently, only about three-quarters of an inch, to the left. Instantly the Extra stunt plane rotates as if on a swivel, swift and smooth. The Santa Monica Mountains suddenly spring up from out of view behind me and swing clockwise from the left to the right side of the glass canopy. My stomach swallows my heart and the brilliant blue sky is replaced by the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean, brushed with the white caps of breakers. And now we’re headed straight down, plummeting toward the water and our imminent deaths at negative 3 g’s. Lighter than weightless.

I have never known fear like this. It is complete. Robust. All encompassing. And yet, strangely fulfilling.

Every cell in my body revolts, rebelling at the utter unnaturalness of what it is experiencing. I fight to keep some semblance of clarity. My life is literally in my hands as I hold the stick firm, hurtling toward a watery grave, waiting for a command from the divine voice to come booming over my earpiece. It’s hard to breathe.

“Ok, pull up!” the bodiless voice barks. I pull the stick toward me as the engine rips back to life and the plane begins to correct itself, moving from an orientation perpendicular to the ground to the much more panic-free parallel, segueing from negative 3 to positive 4 g’s while seemingly all the blood in my body pools at my feet. “Nicely done!” says God -- I mean Tex -- from behind as we zoom over the coastline dotted with $10 million homes shimmering in the afternoon sun. A cold sweat covers my bloodless cheeks and trickles down my neck into the valley of my spine. I just completed my first, but what would not be my last, hammerhead.

Just a couple of weeks ago I’d have never imagined I’d be in a state-of-the-art plane as it executed a grocery list of high altitude stunts: loops, barrel rolls, aileron rolls, hammerheads, tumbles, freestyles, etc. But it’s one thing to be a passenger in a plane as it executes these complex maneuvers -- a thrilling thing, at that -- but to actually pilot the plane through them? No way, that wasn’t even in my paradigm of reality. And that is what is truly miraculous about the Sky Combat Ace experience: you’re not just sitting in a seat impotently while an expert takes you through a series of stomach churning exercises -- you are the one that holds the control stick, that maneuvers this incredibly agile carbon fiber-constructed machine as it cuts through the skies at hundreds of miles per hour. It is you living a parallel life; experiencing something 99% of us never imagined possible. Next Page >>