Chapter 7

“I’m thinking about taking an aerobatic course,” I said to Ben one day.

“Why? Why turn a perfectly good airplane upside down?” He gave me a skeptical sideways glance.

“I’ve been reading about it a lot lately. It’ll make me a safer pilot, knowing how to recover from spins or getting flipped inverted.”

He scoffed. “You’re crazy. How often does that happen?”

“Once would be too often.”

“Do whatever you want,” he said, “but I still think you’re crazy.”

It annoyed me that Ben was still dismissing my opinions. After I moved back in, I’d started asserting myself more often, and this was one of those moments. In the past, I’d often deferred to him on larger decisions (such as where we would live) even though I told myself I was an independent woman, but now I was questioning him more often, and this usually led to arguments. Still grappling with the feeling that I was selfish to insist on my own needs, I felt like we were moving one step forward, two steps back. I still loved him deeply, but sometimes I was certain our relationship was hovering on the edge of disaster, just like a plane can suddenly spin out of control and plunge toward the ground if you make one wrong movement.

* * *

A week later, I was flying with a student named Josh near Hayward, California. “Raise the nose for a departure stall,” I told him as we circled over the hills. His rapid breathing rasped over the intercom, and he was clenching his jaw. I inched my right hand onto my thigh and shifted my feet over the rudder pedals, preparing to take the controls if necessary. I couldn’t help feeling a little nervous myself. Although I’d been instructing private pilot flight students for over six months, I still found stalls scary—especially if I wasn’t the one performing them. Every stall carried with it the risk that the student might put the plane into a spin, a maneuver that had killed so many pilots that the FAA had banned it from private pilot flight training. I was about to learn exactly what could make stalls with a student pilot particularly frightening.

Josh jerked the nose upward, and the Cessna swung to the left.

“Right rudder!” I called, but it was too late. The nose dropped dramatically toward the ground and began to oscillate. Everything blurred. We were entering a spin!

“My airplane!” I shouted, and luckily, Josh immediately released the controls. It was all happening so fast. Holding down panic, I pushed hard on the right rudder pedal and reduced the throttle to idle, executing the drill for spin recovery. I was doing everything I’d been trained to do, but I’d completely lost the sense of our physical location in space. Finally, the view outside the windshield stabilized, and the voice inside my head stopped screaming. I gradually fed in throttle and raised the nose to level flight.

Josh and I were both breathing hard. I’d managed to save us this time, but it bothered me that I didn’t understand why the spin recovery procedure worked. Sure, I’d followed the steps I’d been taught, but shouldn’t I, as an instructor and supposedly an expert, have a deeper comprehension of the underlying forces involved? Shouldn’t I have been able to feel what was going to happen before we got into the spin?

When my dad taught me math, he always made sure I understood why the proofs and equations were correct. “You shouldn’t just memorize, but understand,” he said. “Now I want you to derive this proof yourself. Work it out, step by step.” He’d slide another piece of paper to my side of the desk, and I’d set to work. His method took longer, but whenever I saw a similar problem again, I could solve it.

Now I was dealing with the same principle, only this time my life—and the life of a student—might depend on it. Without understanding why, there was no guarantee I could recover from a spin. And if I’d been unable to recover, we could have lost control of the airplane and plunged into the hills below. Although I’d been trained in basic emergency procedures, I needed to go beyond rote memorization. I knew what I had to do next, but I’d been dreading taking that step.

This incident solidified why I needed to take an aerobatic safety course and learn more about what an aircraft was capable of—including spins, loops, and rolling upside down. As I’d just seen, my life might depend on learning this skill. Yet, the thought of aerobatic training terrified me more than just about any other flying experience I’d had. Lots of people got private pilot licenses, but few took aerobatic training.

Spin training and recovery used to be taught to all pilots. But in 1949, the Federal Aviation Administration, concerned with the high number of spin-related training accidents, removed the requirement for spins in the private pilot curriculum. Instructors are still required to receive basic spin training, but, perhaps because their instructors have had limited spin experience, that training is minimal. Clearly, my own education hadn’t been sufficient for me to understand what was going on. I promised myself I would only take the basic ten-hour aerobatic course, just enough to learn how to stay safe and improve my skills, and then I would never subject myself to that terror again.

* * *

The metal airport gate squeaked as I slid my security badge into the slot. It was the morning of my first aerobatic lesson, and I was more nervous than I’d been for quite a while. The aroma of the bay rushed in through my open window. I took a deep breath before driving onto the field. This was it.

George Newell met me in a small alcove in Lou Fields’s hangar that doubled as a classroom. George was an experienced instructor, a large, soft man with an apologetic air that masked a deep and abiding enthusiasm for aerobatic flight. He carefully described the basic maneuvers we’d be doing today—the loop and roll—with the aid of a whiteboard and a model airplane mounted on a wooden dowel. He explained entry speeds and safety concerns in his calm, quiet voice, and demonstrated the use of Lou’s old military surplus parachutes.

After the classroom lesson, we walked out to the same orange Citabria I’d flown with Maureen, tied down at the far edge of the taxiway. A trio of marsh birds squawked over a catch in the long grass by the edge of the slough. The fog had burned off, and the sky gleamed an eggshell blue. The temperature was in the low seventies with a touch of breeze, no more than five knots out of the northwest.

I’d flown this plane for many hours. But today its familiar lines took on a more intimidating aura. George removed the large orange cushions from the back seat, exposing black metal slats from the skeleton of the plane, to make room for him to sit on the thick parachute without bumping into the headliner. The visible bare metal underscored the plane’s transformation from comfort to something more ominous.

We both strapped on our parachutes, required by law for all aerobatic flights, and I climbed into the front seat. Of course, I had no need to remove any cushions. Even with the parachute, I needed them and extras to reach the rudder pedals and to see over the nose. Most women pilots have trouble reaching the controls in small American planes, since they tend to be designed for the average male at five feet ten inches. (By contrast, Russian planes all use adjustable rudder pedals, enabling a much wider variation in pilot height.)

I did my usual obsessive double-checking of each headset connection, adjusting each strap, and tightening the seat belts repeatedly. George was patient with me, settling his bulk into the back seat of the Citabria while occasionally making a gentle comment or joke.

My adrenaline was pumping and my heart beating at what felt like two hundred times a minute at the thought of flying a loop or rolling the plane upside down, but I took a deep breath and started the engine. We taxied out, and I took off, heading to the tiny practice area George had marked on the map, next to Mount Diablo, twenty miles away. In the busy airspace of the San Francisco Bay area, there were only a few spots where aerobatics was legally permitted. And unfortunately, since the Citabria only had 115 horsepower, it was going to take a long time to get there and cost a lot of money in rental fees.

Finally, we arrived in the practice area, and I did four or five clearing turns.

Then George took the controls to demonstrate a roll. “I’m diving at a hundred twenty-five miles per hour,” he explained. “Then I pitch up, neutralize the stick, apply full left aileron and some left rudder.”

The horizon pitched and tilted crazily in the windshield. The heavy webbing of Lou’s old green parachute cut into the skin of my arms and neck. My internal organs felt like they were shifting around inside my gut. My breathing accelerated, and I couldn’t help clutching the metal bar under the instrument panel in a futile attempt to stay oriented.

Aerobatics is like nothing else in this world. It’s strange and disorienting the first time you turn upside down in the middle of the air, the first time you feel yourself weighing too much or too little. We take the Earth’s pull for granted. A lifetime of living in its gravity field has made us completely unaware of the millions of tiny bodily reactions, motions, and little bits of knowledge that we’ve incorporated into our perceptions.

The Citabria sported large windows on both sides, and even an overhead skylight. This gives you tremendous visibility, more than 180 degrees from left to right, and a significant range both above and below. It felt like I could see everything, like every sense was engaged as we dove for speed. The terrain whipped by faster and faster; my eyes darted back and forth, looking for other airplanes, checking for landmarks on the ground. As our speed increased, the clamor of air rushing past the plane intensified. The airplane’s vibration surged. Even the scent of the air streaming in through the vents changed. At four or five thousand feet, I smelled the dry California scrub, thistle and broom, live oak and spurge on the steep hills below. As we dove, the scent intensified.

George pulled back on the stick, and centrifugal force pressed me into the seat. That strange change in perceived gravity known as “g-force” made itself known as it pulled every muscle and cell of my body downward, squeezing me into the cushions and drawing blood away from my brain. I tensed my muscles as George had taught, straining the long muscles of my quadriceps, drawing in my abdominals, breathing thick and fast through my mouth and nose to keep my brain oxygenated.

In front of me lay nothing but empty blue sky as we pointed the nose up into the air. As George released the pull, my stomach lifted into my ribs and I became light in the seat, freed from the relentless pull of gravity, with the spaces between my cells widening. George applied full left aileron for the roll, and the stick moved all the way to the left-hand stop. We pointed straight at Mount Diablo, and George told me the nose would inscribe a rough oval in the air with the peak of the mountain at its center. Of course, I couldn’t see it. A quick glance out the skylight, and all I noticed was vineyards above my head. Beneath my feet, blue sky.

As earth and sky whirled around me, every muscle seemed to tingle. I was dancing! Dancing in the sky. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened to my body and soul, but I knew my world had been irrevocably altered once again. Never again would I be content to keep the ground underneath my feet. Now I needed to be more than a Cessna pilot. I needed aerobatics. I needed to learn this new world of spinning and looping and flipping through the sky, just as a few short years ago I needed that first flying lesson.

Straight and level flying was wonderful, but twirling upside down was miraculous. This was it. I’d found my new calling.

First, though, I’d have to deal with one small problem—the waves of nausea sweeping over me.

George’s cheerful voice came over the intercom. “How about if I demonstrate a loop now?”

“Ohhh,” I groaned. I keyed the mic. “Uh, I think we need to head back. I’m not feeling so good.”

I managed to avoid throwing up on the bumpy flight back to the Oakland Airport. We’d done exactly one maneuver in 1.2 hours. One expensive-as-hell maneuver.

It felt like paradise had been offered and snatched away at the same time. I’d experienced such joy on that flight, but the combination of my tendency toward airsickness and my lack of funds was going to keep me from being able to repeat it. Gloomy, I pushed the airplane back into its spot, answering George with monosyllables. Then, as I carried my parachute and cushions back to the hangar, I rallied. Hadn’t I had to steel myself to take that first flight lesson? Hadn’t I once believed I was incapable of earning a private pilot license? I’d overcome my fears before. I’d found a way to earn the money I needed to get my private, commercial, and instructor certificates. I’d done it before, so I could do it again.

It was just like mathematical induction. I had to logically analyze the next challenges I needed to solve. Over the next few days, I came up with two major ideas to improve the ratio of time spent learning aerobatics to time spent getting airsick. First, I booked double lessons with George so that we could take a break at an airport closer to the practice area, either Livermore or Tracy. This gave my stomach time to settle, and we could discuss the maneuvers calmly on the ground, then it was a short flight back out to the practice area, which meant less rental time. Second, I spent as much time as I could visualizing the maneuvers on the ground.

Visualization, or imagining yourself doing a physical activity, is a technique for skill development that’s well known in the sports world. In one famous study, kids learned basketball free throws better by simply imagining themselves putting the ball through the hoop than by actually practicing.

Visualizing aerobatic maneuvers cost me nothing, and I rapidly became very good at imagining myself strapped into the airplane, breathing in that distinctive blend of aviation fuel and native California vegetation from the ground below, feeling that heaviness in every muscle in my body as g-forces squashed me into the seat, as the horizon flipped and rotated in the windshield.

All the money I earned teaching was now going right back into buying aerobatic flight lessons. I sold my Cessna 150 to pay for Citabria rentals. I gave up other forms of entertainment. Who needs to go to movies, when no story could possibly compare with living the incredible dream of flying every day? Before I took up flying, I was often plagued by depression and sadness, the feeling that my life was empty, and there was no particular reason to get up in the morning. But now, every single time the wheels of my plane rose from the earth in preparation for an aerobatic flight, euphoria spread through me like the warmth of the sun.

Flying had eased my sadness, and aerobatics had lifted me into a life that was full of joy.

* * *

I’d spent most of my earlier life believing the world was a dark place—one where bullies got away with harming others and corruption and dishonesty were never punished. I’d believed that true joy was only found in books or fantasies.

In sixth grade, most of my school days were bad, but gym class was one of the worst parts of the day. It often allowed Don and his friends more creative means of attacking me under the guise of “sports.” Don’s friend once threw a basketball at me so hard it dislocated a bone in my finger. Then there were the relay races in which the smaller kids like me were carried piggyback across the gym by our bigger classmates. During one of these races, Don took the opportunity to drop me straight on my tailbone. I lay on the dirty gym floor writhing in pain.

Don kicked me hard in the ribs. “Get up, you faker!”

The teacher blew his whistle, and I saw the toes of his tennis shoes as he approached.

“She’s just faking,” Don said.

Instead of chastising Don, the teacher said, “Get up, Rodriguez. You’re fine.”

I struggled to sit up, pain lancing through my tailbone and ribs.

During those early years, I can’t remember a single time a teacher took my side over that of a white male. It got to the point where I simply gave up and stopped protesting. I retreated into a world of fantasy and magic, searching for sources of happiness in books.

I spent my early years in a world where dreams never came true, where I was told I should expect less and “be more realistic.”

In those days, looking up at the trees around my house in Indiana, my dream of levitating, of dancing in the air, of flying free from gravity, seemed unreachable. Only characters in books got to fly. Magic didn’t exist. The world was a grim place.

But now, somehow, miraculously, I’d broken the rules. The thrill I felt with each takeoff made me believe that everything I thought impossible was within reach after all.

For the first time, I began to imagine a future I knew I could make real.

Learning aerobatics was worth overcoming every hurdle. I would beat back my fear. I would find the money to train. I would learn how to overcome my airsickness. I would do whatever it took to achieve perfection in my art, to touch and grasp that inner joy. Earning my private pilot license had marked the beginning of changing my life; it had been the first step in overcoming my fear so I could lead a larger life. But aerobatics felt to me like the culmination of flying, the art for which all my previous training had been only a preamble. Now I could create something larger than me in the world. I was going to work at it until I succeeded.

* * *

Every couple of days—in the early mornings or on afternoons stolen from work—I flew with George and learned how to make the Citabria spin, roll, and loop the way I’d imagined. Day by day, my nausea receded, and my expertise with the airplane increased. After only a few short months, I was performing maneuvers I’d only seen before in airshows, like the Immelmann turn (a half-loop followed by a half-roll upright), split-S (half-roll to inverted followed by a half-loop down, like the bottom half of an S) and half Cuban eight (five-eighths of a loop followed by a half-roll).

One afternoon I was winding the heavy tie-down chain through the tailwheel of the Citabria after a particularly exhilarating and sweaty flight, when George said, “Hey, you know what, Cecilia? There’s going to be an aerobatic contest at Taft Airport in a couple of weeks. I think you should go.”

I laughed. “A contest? Me?” Yes, I’d gone beyond the ten-hour course and never wanted to stop. But compete?

George snapped his seat cushion back into place and nodded vigorously. “You’re doing very well.”

“Are you sure you’ve got the right person?”

“It’s informal and designed for beginners, like a neighborhood soccer game. You’d be flying in the Basic category, so it’s not like anyone there would be an aerobatic expert. Even if you don’t win, you’d learn a lot just from participating in the contest.”

I paused. Put that way, it almost sounded like fun.

George was one of the most supportive people I knew, kind and relentlessly encouraging. He always had his students’ best interests at heart. I’d spent enough flight hours with him to feel comfortable sharing confidences, so I told him my big fear in a quiet voice: “People would laugh at me.”

George’s broad forehead smoothed out. “Aw, nobody would. I’ve come in last many times. If nothing else, you’ll make good friends with the person who came in second to last.”

I hooked the chain into position and met George’s eyes. His soft, round face expressed nothing but enthusiasm. He wouldn’t be so eager if he didn’t believe it was a good thing for me to do. Attending a contest, challenging though it might be, just might be the next step for me to take to grow as a pilot.

I signed up.