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FULLERTON, Calif. -- A blue sky beckons, scoured clean and studded with puffy clouds after a string of rainy days. A dusting of snow glints on the peaks of the distant San Bernardino Mountains. And in what seems like a propitious sign, a red-tailed hawk is doing cartwheels above the runway at Fullerton's municipal airport.
Parachute on my back and heart in my throat, I'm cinched into the forward cockpit of a high-performance Pitts S-2C biplane -- ready for my own airborne acrobatics, and a timely reminder of how joyful flying can be.
Amid a summer of rising fares, slumping service and predictions of what could be the highest load factors since World War II, commercial air travel is as enticing as catching a bus.
But outfits like Fullerton-based Sky-Thrills, tapping into a growing desire for experiential, adrenaline-fueled vacations, aim to convince jaded frequent fliers that a few spins, rolls and zero-gravity parabolas may be just the ticket until they can take the ultimate thrill ride: a suborbital trip into space, which Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic hopes to offer in two years.
I'm on board with that. A low tolerance for math and engineering has kept me from flying lessons, but I've been an enthusiastic passenger in everything from a microlight (essentially, a lawn mower with wings) over Africa's Victoria Falls to a military C-130 Hercules cargo plane out of Midway Island. Though I'd love to book a zero-gravity flight on a commercial version of the "vomit comet," a nickname for the aircraft used in NASA's weightlessness training, I can't stomach the $3,750 price tag.
Enter SkyThrills' "Astronaut Adventure": $495 for nearly an hour of hands-on high jinks above the Pacific, including flying upside down and "launch sequences" that simulate a space-shuttle liftoff.
My 33-year-old co-pilot and instructor, Mike "Rocket" Blackstone, has been flying since he was 8. (His father runs a companion operation, Air Combat USA, that lets Tom Cruise wannabes duke it out in aerial dogfights with military trainer aircraft.)
A first officer with American Airlines, Blackstone can wax poetic about tracking constellations through a moonless sky or nailing a particularly smooth landing in a B-737. But as he leads me through a pre-flight chalkboard briefing, it's clear his passions lie with more nimble methods of reaching for the heavens.
Considered one of the world's best aerobatic planes, the two-seater, dual-control Pitts S-2C is a lightweight 1,700 pounds. Its 260-horsepower engine can pull up to 6 Gs (centrifugal forces equal to six times that of gravity), hit a top speed of 212 mph and power a 360-degree roll in less time than it takes to stifle a gag reflex.
Not that I'll be losing my lunch, Blackstone says.
He has taken more than 3,500 adrenaline addicts and would-be barnstormers aloft, nearly half of them women. Only a few have needed the barf bags stashed just below the red handle that jettisons the canopy for an emergency bailout -- an even-more-unlikely scenario, our FAA-required parachutes notwithstanding.
By tightening my core muscles to slow blood flowing from the brain, Blackstone says, I'll be able to avoid that dreaded top-of-the-roller-coaster feeling in the pit of my stomach, along with such nasty G-force side effects as "grayout" (black and white tunnel vision), "redout" (capillaries bursting in the eyes),"blackout" (still conscious, but temporarily blind) and G-LOC (loss of consciousness; definitely not something a solo pilot wants to experience).
So far, so good. But I still need convincing that a newbie who barely knows a rudder from an altimeter could take the controls of an aircraft and fly a straight mile, much less nail a hammerhead -- a pure vertical climb capped by a 180-degree U-turn at near-zero airspeed and an equally precipitous dive. My conversion comes a few minutes after takeoff, when we accelerate past 1,500 feet toward the Palos Verdes peninsula and Blackstone breezily announces, "You've got the airplane, my friend ... you're driving."
So what if I pull back on the stick (that's pilot talk for changing altitude) and, my logic addled by a surge of adrenaline, think I'm at 7,000 feet when we're really at 2,700?
"The big hand (of the altimeter) is going to be the hundreds, and the little hand's going to be the thousands," my co-pilot explains, nary a hint of condescension in his voice.
With Blackstone as a back-seat driver, knowing that if and when I mess up he'll take over in a nanosecond, I'm more relaxed than I was heading up the Santa Ana Freeway an hour earlier.
We're a mile high now, admiring oil tankers and the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor, spotting Newport, Laguna and other Orange County hot spots to the south, and heading over the Pacific with Santa Catalina Island looming in the west.
Time to practice a few turns: Look left, turn the stick to the left. Look right, turn right. A little steeper, a little more bank, a little more pull.
Bring 'em on!
"It's not that hard, is it? We like to keep it a secret," Blackstone says. "When you have a plane this high-performance, almost thinking it, it happens. But if you're rough on this one, it's a terrible ride. It's an extension of you."
Before I can conjure Amelia Earhart, I've made it through three rolls and a loop. Then, a couple of hammerheads: Push the stick over to 190 mph and head straight for the Pacific. Tighten my stomach and look left. Pull pull pull, head the plane straight up, feel a little zero G. Push my foot all the way down on the left rudder, push the stick down and to the right.
Dive. Tighten up as I pull back to recover -- and yelp at the unexpected thrill of spotting a school of more than 100 dolphins directly below us.
A few spins later, it's show time.
I reach into my flight suit and pull out the wooden stick figure that will prove I've achieved several seconds of weightlessness during a series of parabolic arcs.
Suddenly, the little man is floating in midair, but my stomach is not. Six back-to-back up-and-downs with Blackstone at the controls, and I'm still wearing a grin wide enough to reach Catalina.
Before we head back to the hangar, Blackstone lays on the charm ("You're bulletproof!") and suggests a session of inverted flight over the cavorting dolphins we'd spotted earlier.
I'm game, but quickly discover that dangling upside down is disorienting enough without worrying about keeping the wings level, relaxing the stick and pulling to the right. Or was that left?
No matter.
The dolphins are still there, and so is my enthusiasm. I do it. And when Blackstone reports that we've pulled between 4 and 4.5 Gs, I want to go for a few more maneuvers -- and a shot at 5 or 6 Gs.
I get my wish, Blackstone whooping and hollering along with me, before we head east toward terra firma.
Leaning back as he takes over for the approach and landing, I follow the right wing tip and spot a familiar Southern California landmark: Disneyland's Matterhorn, the theme park's first roller coaster and the setting for some of my own conquered childhood fears.
Back then, the Matterhorn's bobsled terrified me. Today, Space Mountain would be a yawn.
Virgin Galactic flights, here I come.
E-mail lbly@usatoday.com
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