ARTICLES

Spin! Loop! Roll!
Profit Magazine
By Eve Lazarus

Trevor Skillen was coming into final approach at Boundary Bay airport about eight years ago when the Piper PA-140 he was flying hit a wind sheer. Without warning the plane suddenly plunged one hundred feet. “It scared the hell out of me,” recalls the president and CEO of Metasoft Systems Inc., an information consulting and software development firm in Vancouver. “If you are used to planes rafting a certain way to all of a sudden plunge like a stone out of the sky was totally disorienting. It took me another month to get back in the air.”

His flight instructor advised Skillen that aerobatic training would desensitize and prepare him for such unexpected incidents, but Skillen balked. “I said, ‘you must be crazy! I don’t want to do aerobatics.’ And he said, ‘These sorts of things are occasionally going to happen to you and you need to not have them totally fluster you’.”

So Skillen signed up to learn basic aerobatic manoeuvers at the Victoria Flying Club. In a North American Harvard aerobatic trainer from World War 11, he learned how to loop, spin and roll. “It’s complete freedom,” says Skillen. “Imagine, you can go wherever you want to go and do whatever you want to do.”

Skillen, 51, who says he’s afraid of heights, started flying in 1993. He was looking at buying a small aviation software company and decided if he was serious about the business he should learn to fly. The purchase never happened, but Skillen was hooked. He spent $10,000 and two years to get his pilot’s license.

While dedicated aerobatics courses are available, Skillen opted to learn the basics from two of his regular flight instructors who are certified in aerobatics. It took him about 10 hours in the air to become comfortable enough to do the manoeuvres on his own.

During a typical aerobatic ride, Skillen runs through a sequence that includes flying loops, barrel rolls, hammerheads and Cuban eights. And he’ll typically experience g-forces between plus-three and minus-one. Caused by extreme changes in acceleration and direction, says Skillen, “a negative g is when your head feels like it’s going to burst and a positive G is when you feel very heavy all of a sudden. It feels like everything is being pushed down.” About 30 minutes in the air is all you can take, he adds: “When you land, you’re completely drained.”

Skillen owns two planes, a two-seat Citabria (spelled backwards its airbatic) and used to train civilians, and a bright yellow Stearman PT-27 military trainer, the iconic World War 11 biplane. The warbird set Skillen back $100,000 and costs another $10,000 or so a year to keep it in the air. “Flying is a bit of a luxury,” he says. “But it’s one of those luxuries that you’ll spend any money to do no question—it does get in your blood.”

He describes the Stearman as a “big, loud, smelly, oil spilling engine. “Before you fly you check the gas and fill up the oil and you emerge after a flight in this fine mist of oil and revel in the experience.” The biplane weighs in at 3,600 lbs., has a cruising speed of 125 mph and, unlike the Citabria, has an open cockpit—which makes a flight feel like riding a motorcycle in the sky.

Skillen’s aerobatic adventures have produced some terrifying moments. Once his plane fell over backward while coming out of a hammerhead. “I thought that was it,” he says. “It felt like a medal falling through the air. At that point you are a passenger in a falling object as opposed to a pilot of a plane.”

Flying, says Skillen, is a perfect metaphor for business and for life. “You need to know who you are, where you are and where you want to go. You don’t leave the ground without knowing those three things.”

Ask the father of three young children if he’s afraid of the risks and he’ll tell you statistically flying is safer than skydiving and a lot less stressful then driving a car in Vancouver. “I’ve had probably four or five car accidents in 30 years, but no plane accidents.”

Still, he maintains the biggest dangers to a pilot aren’t dare devilish stunts, but complacency and stupidity. Once, when he was flying about 30 feet over a mountain ridge a glider rose up 10 feet away. “It was my fault for not leaving myself enough visibility or react time,” he says. “Your heart skips a beat and you realize 10 feet to the left and it would have been all over.”

BE A PILOT FOR A DAY

Those looking for the ultimate rollercoaster ride might find one more easily stateside. According to Brent Rogers, president of Aerobatics Canada, high insurance costs, seasonality and endless bureaucracy have put most stunt-plane operators out of business.

Central Aviation of Wetaskiwin, Alberta offers rides—sans stunts—from May 15 through Labour Day in three classic biplanes: a 1945 Boeing Stearman, a 1939 or a 1941 Waco. Expect to pay $109 for a 10-minute flight or $350 for 50 minutes in the air. www.centralaviation.ca or 780-352-9689.

Too tame? Incredible Adventures, an extreme travel company in Sarasota, Florida, offers flying adventures from aerobatics to combat duels through a network of certified flight companies. Sample trips: an hour in a T-34A Mentor, including aerobatics and a video, is US$699; a Top Dog Duel in a Varga VG-21 with the enemy of your choice costs $US596. For US$19,000 Incredible Adventures will put together a two-hour air combat dog fighting flight. A sort of paintball in the skies for big kids, you get all the stunts, get to put the other plane in your gun sights and if you hit them smoke comes out of the tail. www.incredible-adventures.com or 1-800-644-7382.

North American Top Gun gives you the opportunity to loop and roll or try out some high g- combat manoeuvres in its T-6 Texan warbirds. While the firm’s home base is in St. Augustine, Florida, its planes travel to several airports in border states for nine months each year. Prices start at US$225 for a 15 minute flight up to US$645 for an hour. www.natg.com or 800-257-1636.

Of course that ultimate thrill may be as close as your nearest amusement park. At Playland in Vancouver, the Revelation looks like a giant airplane propeller and holds two to four riders in cockpit seats at each end of its 160-foot arm. Riders spin up to 100 kph and experience g-forces of 2.3 – roughly the same as fighter pilots. Revelation tickets cost $16.00 each (park admission is extra).