Acrobatics
Saturday April 24, 2004 is memorable day for me. The person in this Picture is Mr. George Sulcs, Chief Technological Officer and Director of a company I worked for. He is a hobbyist pilot and Acrobat. I always talked to him about his hobby and experiences as a pilot.
Saturday was a beautiful day in Cleveland, Sunny and warm. So George called around 3.00 and asked and if I am interested in flight and acrobatic experience. I immediately agreed.
Cleveland metropolitan area has around 4 small airports apart from an International airport. His hanger is located at Gauga County airport, 40 miles from my home. But he asked me to drive to another airport which is just 12 miles. And he flew there.
His plane is a two seater, 1997 beautiful machine. He gave me a parachute and taught basic safety. We get in, he started the engine. It was too windy and noisy. Immediately we put our headphones and started talking through headphone. We got green signal from Control tower, he throttled the engine and we took off.
What an exciting moment was that! Left, right, above and front everywhere sky and land. Things started looking smaller. Houses, freeways, cars, airport and jungles!
we started moving towards south east part of Cleveland where he does Acrobats.
Acrobatics are bold air demonstrations of abilities of a pilot, which include taking plane straight up, down, making loops and stalling. Staling is reducing engine speed to such a minimum that plane can not fly any more and start coming down with gravity (and gaining control again off course).
George was not sure of my abilities to handle acrobatics. So he said "I will do a simple loop and tell me how you feel� And he turned the nose of plane straight up and.......... I felt like tons of things are falling on me. And soon he finished climbing up and did nose straight down and I was in a weightless situation. Great experience!
Then He told me that I experienced 4 times of gravitational force while climbing and 1/2 of gravitational force while coming down.
I felt OK while doing this and then he performed all Acrobatic tricks. Parachute was my only relief. Staling was very very scary.
Then...........he told me that flying is not a difficult thing and asked me to take the control. Prior to that he had told me basics of controls. Though I was in back sea\t I had all the controls. I turned the plane to left, right, above and down with a shaky hand! I really did not want to do that, but he encouraged me to do that.....and I did.
After 40 minutes flying time, we landed on Gauga Airport and he showed me some of the planes there, introduced with some of his friends who were making planes.
I was thinking that he will put his plane back in hanger and drop me to our departure airport by his Porsche ! But after a small break we started flying back. He said he hates driving especially when he can fly.
We landed safely to Cuyahoga airport; I thanked him and drove back to m home. I was driving like an airplane that time.
It was rarest rare opportunity for me. To fly in a small plane at ones will is a rare opportunity. But to experience Acrobatics is definitely a rarest rare chance and I enjoyed it.
posted by Shantanu Shaligram at 1:29 PM
0
comments
