“Are we going to do the loop the loop?”
“Not a chance,” say Martyn Carrington and Mike Dentith in unison, both shaking their heads and sucking their teeth.
“Why not?”
“Because twelve minutes of normal flying will be more than enough.”
Martyn and Mike are the full time pilots for the Utterly Butterly Wing Walking Team. They are the real thing; fully fledged aeronauts. They spend their lives in the air drawing gasps of awe and wonder from audiences all over the world.
“Not even a little one?”
“Nope.”
I am at the RFC Rendcomb Airfield, just outside of Cirencester in Gloucestershire. It was originally a World War I training post for pilots and crew and oozes nostalgia from a bygone age; airmen stare from fuzzy sepia group photographs and vintage adverts adorn the walls. There are also a dozen wonderfully restored motorcycles with shiny tanks and hooked handle bars to complete the scene.
I’m here to have a go at wing walking and as I pull on numerous layers of clothing the pilots are briefing me on what I should do.
“You need to keep waving your arms and legs otherwise you’ll look like a sack of spuds,” I’m told. “And smile if you can.”
We are joined by Helen Tempest, Operations Director and Britain’s most experienced wing walker. She’s been doing it for 22 years and is in charge of all choreography and recruiting of new team members.
“People don’t realise how fit you need to be,” she says, “I spend all winter in the gym in preparation for the summer season when I might do three of four shows a day. It’s not a job, it’s my life.”
It’s not only air shows that they perform at, they can be booked for any occasion from weddings to birthday parties; as long as the display area fits all the relevant aviation criteria they’ll turn up.
We go outside to the aircraft which are Boeing Stearman bi-planes; they are resplendent in the team’s bright yellow and blue livery and they seem much smaller than I at first assumed. Martyn guides me into position by telling me where to put my feet as I clamber onto the wing. The plane appears to be made of wire and sticky-back plastic, bowing and creaking as I’m lashed into place. My bottom is on the aeronautical equivalent of a shooting stick and I have two very small fabric straps over my shoulders. That’s it.
“If it all gets too much just signal with your thumbs to the ground and we’ll come back down,” says Martyn, “ otherwise enjoy the flight.” I look to my right and see Andrew the photographer peering back at me through his lens, he’s in the front seat of the other Boeing and gives me a reassuring wave. The motor churns into life and the blades on the propeller become an instant blur.
We need to wait for a few minutes as the 440 break horse power engine warms up and at that point it begins to hail. Tiny ice bullets bounce off my exposed face and I squint through my goggles at the blue sky beyond the dark clouds. We’re not even moving and I am in pain.
We then taxi across the airfield and line up side by side. The engine goes from a whine to a roar and we speed off across the uneven grass; every undulation and bump rippling up through my feet. Within seconds the ground is peeling away and the pressure forces me back onto the shooting stick.
This is nothing compared to pressure on my face and body though. It’s intense; my cheeks appear to have slid back to join my ears; my breathing is coming in short bursts as I fight to get air back out of my lungs and my arms are pinned to my sides.
The other plane is no more than twenty yards away and Mike is waving at me frantically, signalling for me to my wave my arms. I start to flap them, put them out like a school yard fighter pilot, point forward, do a thumbs up and anything else that comes to mind. It’s extraordinarily difficult because of the unrelenting wind.
In a fit of dramatic endeavour I try a star jump by flinging my hands upwards and my legs outwards. My feet snap backwards and I assume the position of a skydiver plummeting to earth.
Thankfully the hail has stopped and the views are truly stunning with mile upon mile of Cotswold countryside for as far as the eye can see. However, I seem to have lost all sense of spatial awareness because I’m concentrating so hard on staying animated and struggling to breath. The fact that I am strapped to a tiny plane several hundred feet above the ground doesn’t seem to register and I begin to wonder how long we have left in the air with all thoughts of loop the loops long dissipated.
We buzz back and forth, each time I become passive more gesticulations from Mike to get moving again. The camera lens glints in the spring sunlight as we back track through the display smoke that had only seconds before been pouring from our rear. It goes on for what feels like an eternity and just as I think my ear drums are actually to going explode and I consider the thumbs down signal, we start to descend, back to RFC Rendcomb.
The plane touches down, decelerates and we taxi to a halt by the billet. My face is covered with the contents of my nose and possibly the deeper recesses of my skull, my cheeks feel like I been involved in a slapping contest and my arms are stiff with exertion.
“How was that?” Says Martyn as he unbuckles me.
“Awesome,” I croak. |
