Flight Day: post 6

A few mid flight photos. Not many of these as we spent half the time upside-down and I was afraid of dropping the camera out this opening in my canopy. It was 30 degrees and we were essentially sitting in a greenhouse 3000 feet closer to the sun than most folk so we needed the draft.

Here is Churchy judging my flight suit again (see below)

At this point, i was flying the plane, not very well though, to fly in formation you have to have the prop and the wingtip of the lead plane in line and your distance is determined by the line from the tail wing intersection with a virtual isosceles triangle from the initial formation propeller/wingtip line. I was busy taking photos (and checking churchys flight suit) so I failed that one.

Here is some land. It was bumpy over land (thermals) so we did our aerobatics over the sea. we did loop the loops, barrel rolls, echelon formation stuff, we did a merge (which is where you fly really fast at eachother, then both break right and circle eachother, which is the internationally accepted way of initiating a dogfight. I experienced 4G's for about 10 seconds during a dive/pullup then suceeded immediatly by a flip-stall where i was weightless for a while before plumeting towards the ocean upside-down. It was incredible. I have never experienced such accelleration (except that one time in Owen Kellys mini) and as for the G-forces, i nearly blacked out at one stage because I forgot to clench my leg muscles when all the blood was draining from my head. Dan says he can take up to 8G's now that he is used to them, he flew a plane that can pull 10G's once, but he wouldnt talk about that one.