It’s a jerky video, but you can hear me panting and groaning, on my back, rolling around. At times I’m even upside down. Passion. At the end, you can clearly see and hear me giggling perversely.
The person I was with wasn’t even a woman.
My favorite radio call in an airplane happens 40 kilometers south of Manila, over the 7-hectare manufacturing plant I used to manage.
“Manila Approach, One-Six-Niner-One entering Tango Four at two thousand five hundred feet, commencing aerobatics!”
I imagine airline pilots squirming in their all-singing, all-dancing push-button cockpits. Wondering if a maniac’s Decathlon is about to kamikaze through all that glass. Airliners inbound to Manila from Kalibo, Caticlan and other points south fly right over the T-4 training area.
I finished Meynard Halili’s basic aerobatic course in 2007, then dizzily went on to take lessons in competitive aerobatics, stringing spins, hammerheads and half-Cuban eights together.
You don’t do this in your typical Airbus flight to Boringville.
Aerobatics are intensely visceral. You flash through your maneuver sequence, flinging the airplane through the air, pretending to be in total control. Actually, you surrender completely to physics.
Not like sex at all. More like gymnastics . . . thousands of feet over the ground.
For this flight in July 2009, Meynard reversed our roles. I briefed him on the maneuvers that I would fly.
The only thing Meynard wrote on the whiteboard during the briefing was this:
A perfect basic loop pulls 4 “G”s at the bottom and 1/2 G at the top. Four Gs crush you with four times the force of gravity (I would weigh nearly, ehem, 360 kilos), due to centrifugal force. Many pilots black out at 6 Gs. The airplane tears itself apart beyond 6 Gs.
Inverted at the top of the loop, your weightless feet float off the rudder pedals and your butt tries to swap places with your head as you push the airplane up to round out the loop.
The whole thing, from 360 kilos to weightless to 360 kilos again, takes about seven seconds.
Meynard wanted me to not just feel the G forces, but to fly by them.
Normally we fly aerobatics for an hour, upside down, rolling inverted, or sweating spins.
On that day, we flew two hours. I stopped only after Meynard backhanded me a compliment.
“Okay you maniac, time to go home.”
“One more half-Cuban, Meynard, I want to perfect this.”
“Tonet, we have been flying aerobatics for TWO hours. If you don’t stop now, you will be cleaning up this rear cockpit after we get down!”
“Oh? OH!” I thought aerobatic instructors had an infinite capacity for Gs.
Meynard acted peculiarly on that flight. He whooped repeatedly in the rear seat, slapped my back after many maneuvers, and sang praises for my flying.
Praises?! Back slaps?! This was very unusual.
Meynard, who like Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s teacher Chang is fiercely obsessive on perfection, also knew when to work on self-esteem instead of technique. My confidence soared.
The video? Here.
Back on the ground, Meynard pointed to the G-meter in the front cockpit. An aerobat’s orgasm meter.
It faithfully recorded a maximum of 4 Gs and a minimum of –1/2 G (middle needle points to 1 G instantaneous, since we are on the ground.
Somewhere up there, among dozens of aerobatic maneuvers, we had flown a perfect loop 🙂
Over a year later, I still remember it as one of the happiest flights I’ve had. I haven’t flown upside down since.
Posted From Manila, September 10, 2010
My 53rd birthday 🙂
Aerobatic and Meynard stories
The Secret Love Triangle Between Pitch, Bank and Airspeed
Thy Youth is Restored Like the Eagle’s
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I’d like that radio call – one of my favorites as well !!!
I felt those G’s whilst reading your story !
/T
Happy birthday capt !
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Your feet coming off the rudder pedals, your butt trying to swap places with your head. Then you realize that, despite having tightened your seat belts HARD until you saw stars, they still weren’t tight enough to keep you from separating from the airplane as you roll inverted. Terrorandpanicandexhiliration all rolled into one. Remember? Haha!! The memories keep me sane at work in the office for weeks after 🙂
Thanks, Timo!
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This is a good one…Happy Birthday Tonet!!!
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Many thanks, Tim, and i trust all is well with you!
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I forgot to ask…how did you film this, velcro the camera on your cap?
“..try not to giggle too much, unmanly!” “woo hoo hoooOW”
does really paint a picture of you.
Again, Happy birthday and the very best to you!
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Happy Birthday sir 🙂
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Vince! Salamat. Abroad still?
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happy birthday tonet!
wishing you many more aerobatic sorties to come.
is an 8KCAB in the pipeline? i won’t be surprised if you
trade-in your current side-by-side to a tandem seater.
cheerio!
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Louie! Was afraid I’d lost you. Still planning on that Sydney trip 🙂 Good to hear from you again.
If Meynard ever lets go of that 8KCAB I’ll be first in line 🙂 But he has never sold an airplane and loved it.
Stay in touch, amigo.
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Happy Birthday Bro!
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Maraming salamat, Kapitan!! Parang wala pang blowout yung 4 stripes, sir ha! 🙂
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Hahaha! I imagine Meynard’s tone when he said this:
“Tonet, we have been flying aerobatics for TWO hours. If you don’t stop now, you will be cleaning up this rear cockpit after we get down!” =)
Looks like both of you were satisfied after the maneuvers, I can see it from the smiles from your faces….
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Hey Simon, nice to see you here again. Yes, we had a blast.
And you know what, when Meynard read this article a week ago, he texted me that he became very nostalgic about this flight, a year ago. And it turns out that he flew the Decathlon alone on my birthday. All I needed to have done was call him.
On second thought, maybe it was better that way. You see, I was also in my airplane at that time. So both my favorite airplanes were in the air, with both my favorite pilots 🙂
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It does happen with novels. Now you have things like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters”, not to mention whole series of books that take classics and respin them, usually marketed at kids. “Peter and the St&t1archersa#822c; comes to mind.
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