Chapter 10

“Good vertical, nice pivot, two degrees negative on the downline. Maybe nine point five on the hammerhead. Good job.” Frank’s voice crackled over the radio as I flew the Sportsman sequence at New Jerusalem in my rented Pitts S-2A one hot August afternoon in 1988.

After the checkout with Louie Robinson when I was approved to solo the Pitts, I’d been practicing all day every Sunday with Frank and Stu at New J. It had been a couple of months now, and Frank’s critiques had gone from scathing to cautiously favorable. In some ways, his quest for the perfect aerobatic figure reminded me of my father, who never stopped pushing himself—or me. In Frank, I found a kindred ambitious spirit. Central California’s extreme heat ruled out contests during July and August, but on Labor Day weekend, the largest California contest of the year would be held in Delano, a small agricultural town a few miles north of Bakersfield. This was the contest, Frank told me, where we’d see the best flying of the year. Pilots had been practicing the sequences all summer, honing their skills in the hot California sun. I was anxious because it would only be my second Sportsman contest. I wanted to do well, but I only dared admit to hoping to place above the middle of the pack.

Competition aerobatics is extraordinarily demanding, and flying a perfect-ten maneuver is nearly impossible. No one in aerobatic history has ever completed a contest flight without a single mistake. Scores of ten on individual maneuvers are rare, even for the best pilots. It only takes a split-second error to overshoot a roll, underrotate a snap, or deviate from the precise circle required to fly a perfectly round loop. And every tiny error earns another deduction from the eagle-eyed judges on the ground.

Even so, I loved flying the Pitts S-2A. At last I understood what Frank and everyone else had been saying: the airplane was purpose-built for aerobatics. It wants to fly beautiful maneuvers. It’s only the imperfect human at the controls who mars that achievement. This airplane would fly a flawless routine if I didn’t get in the way. And it had become my goal to reveal those perfect maneuvers, one by one. As I flew the Pitts, it reminded me of something my dad had told me when I was thirteen or fourteen as we did math together: Michelangelo believed every block of stone contained a statue within, waiting to be revealed by the sculptor.

“There’s an underlying structure in the world, a beautiful one,” my dad had said. “And mathematics is the best way to reveal that structure.”

“Not sculpture?” I asked.

“With pencil and paper you can discover the truth. But it’s important to keep going until you find that underlying beauty. Don’t give up too early.”

“Aren’t there times when it’s just too hard to figure out?” I’d been wrestling with a particularly difficult math problem he’d set me. “When it’s a waste of time to keep going?”

“I know you’re good enough to solve this problem. Keep thinking. That cubic equation proof you were struggling with last week? I remember you complaining you’d never figure it out. But you did, and I knew you would. It’s helpful, sometimes, to take some time and look back on what you’ve already accomplished.”

I scowled but went back to work. It took me longer than I expected, but I eventually figured out the answer. When I brought it to him in triumph, he beamed and said, “My buttons are popping.”

Now, flying the Pitts, I had to marvel over how far I’d come. What had happened to the klutz riddled by fear? to the INTF: Incompetent, Nerd, Terrified, Failure? I’d once wondered if it was even possible for me to solo a plane, any plane. But I’d improved so much over the past three years, and now I was flying my dream airplane. My progress fired me up to push even harder. If I’d accomplished this much already, who knew how much further I could go? I even had a sneaking suspicion that maybe a PhD wasn’t as far out of reach as I’d once thought.

I practiced regularly in the relentless heat. At first, my new shoes felt heavy, especially during inverted flight. But after a few days of sore muscles, my legs strengthened, as did my biceps. It often took a hard, fast pull to satisfy Frank’s demands for a crisp transition to vertical. My stick forces were exceptionally high even with the extra forty pounds of lead weight strapped to the seat pan, so it took both of my hands on the stick. I’d started lifting weights at home to build up my upper body strength. I bought a pair of bike gloves so my hands wouldn’t slip off the stick and create a potentially dangerous situation.

“You’re flying well,” Frank told me one afternoon in late August. “I think you’ll put on a good showing at Delano.”

* * *

Santa Rosa Airport was cool and misty in the early-morning sunlight as I prepared the Pitts for its flight to Delano on Labor Day weekend. Getting an aerobatic airplane ready for travel is very different from prepping it for maneuvers. Aerobatic planes typically have little baggage space, so every available nook and cranny must be utilized if you intend to carry any cargo. Fortunately, I travel light. All I needed was a couple of extra T-shirts and sets of underwear, a small toiletry bag, my regular sneakers, a water bottle, of course, and my wallet and keys. That was enough for a four-day trip. For the airplane, I brought plastic quarts of aviation oil, the eighteen-­inch wooden dowel I’d hand-calibrated as a fuel dipstick, rags, a knee board, and extra charts. It all got crammed into the meager turtledeck behind the pilot seat in the cockpit of the Pitts. An extra duffel bag sat under my thighs on the plexiglass floor panels.

I pulled on my stiff flight gloves, sweatshirt, and a jacket. It’d be colder at altitude, but the forecast read one hundred degrees at Delano this afternoon. It was maybe sixty degrees at Santa Rosa. Delano felt like a million miles away. I performed a final preflight inspection, strapped in, and taxied out.

I arrived at the Delano airport a little over an hour later, still chilled from the high-altitude flight. It was stiflingly hot as I descended into the traffic pattern. Once on the ground, I cracked the canopy to let a blast of superheated air into the cockpit. It was still early, but the temperature at Delano had already reached ninety.

Delano (pronounced Duh-lane-oh, not like Franklin Roosevelt’s middle name) is a small town at the south end of California’s Central Valley known primarily for growing table grapes. The area is also famous as the site of the Delano grape strike, which began in 1965 when Filipino farmworkers walked off their jobs, demanding a pay increase to the federal minimum wage of $1.25 per hour. Cesar Chavez and his union joined the strike within a week, and news of the strike spread across the US, where even in Indiana my parents participated in the consumer grape boycott that lasted for five years.

In 1988 Delano’s population hovered around twenty thousand, about the same as my old hometown in Indiana, and the area was known for agriculture and for being the site of the largest Voice of America broadcast facility in the US.

I stayed in the second cheapest motel at thirty dollars per night. Most of the meals I ate over the next four days were at a diner with no name except EAT in all capital letters facing the freeway.

When I asked the local pilots about the major industries in town, they shrugged. “Farming,” said one. Another added, “We’re lobbying heavily for them to open a new prison in town.”

The shock must have shown on my face.

A third pilot smiled. “It’d be great for the local economy.”

Later on, I asked Tom Sumner, a farmer and one of the top Unlimited pilots at the event, about his work. His farm wasn’t far from the airport. He was young, and many of the young pilots I’d met were eager to join the airlines to make a good salary. I asked Tom if his plans included this. He glanced at me incredulously. “No way. I can make tons more money as a farmer than I ever could as an airline pilot.”

It was the first I’d ever heard that some farmers were rich. I always assumed they were all poor and struggling, based on the farmers I knew in Indiana and what I had seen in the media. It turned out that owning a farm could be an extremely lucrative profession. Many of the aerobatic pilots at the contest—90 percent male—were farmers, and their gleaming aircraft—Pitts biplanes and higher-end monoplanes like the German-built Extra and Russian-built Sukhoi—dotted the flight line.

When I entered aviation, it was the first time I’d met wealthy people. Although most pilots were middle class like me, in the upper echelons of aerobatic competition, significant amounts of discretionary income were required. Many of the people at those levels were farmers, airline pilots, business owners, or otherwise independently wealthy. Not for the first time, I was reminded I was getting in over my head financially. Even if I developed the skills to fly aerobatics well, could I afford this sport?

Delano Airport, though hot and dusty, possessed a long, well-­maintained runway, much smoother than New J, where I often had to avoid potholes on landing. I taxied to the small terminal building, shut down the Pitts, and pointed it into the light northwest breeze.

I climbed out of the cockpit, shedding my jacket and sweatshirt with relief. Sitting on the boiling hot tarmac, I unlaced my elevator shoes and switched to my regular sneakers. I sighed with bliss as the hot, arid air hit my feet, drying my sopping wet socks.

A group of pilots clustered near the terminal. Some of them were checking their airplanes, waiting for the contest technical inspection to start. I got into the registration line and filled out the Sportsman paperwork. This was a typical five-category regional contest, with pilots flying the gamut from Basic through Unlimited. Basic and Sportsman pilots would fly twice, and Intermediate, Advanced, and Unlimited three times each.

“Is this your first time flying Sportsman?” a young man in a panama hat asked.

I smiled. “Second. But it’s my first time flying a Pitts in a contest.”

He glanced at my Pitts, white with its jaunty red stripe. “That’s a nice S-2A. Did you just buy it?”

“It’s a rental.”

His eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Where can you rent a Pitts around here?”

“Santa Rosa. But only flight instructors can solo by insurance requirements.”

“That’s a weird-ass insurance requirement.”

I shrugged. “Works for me.”

He grinned. “Do you think you’ll win?”

I broke into laughter, perhaps louder than I should have. “Of course not! I only started a couple of months ago. Who do you think will win?”

He pointed across the taxiway at a wiry man with a shining bald head, wearing a pair of immaculate gray suspenders and busily waxing a gleaming Super Decathlon. “Nick Burkett, for sure. He’s won every other Sportsman contest this year, and he’s hoping to make it a clean sweep with this one. He’s an awesome pilot; been flying that Decathlon for twenty years.” He pursed his lips. “He flies that plane hard. It’s a good thing he maintains it himself, or it would have fallen apart by now, the way he punishes it.”

“Punishes it?”

He shot me a sidelong glance. “You know, overrevs his engine, goes past redline—those sorts of things.”

“Redline” was another word for the “never exceed” speed in all airplanes. I’d been taught exceeding that velocity was dangerous and could lead to structural failure or loss of control of the plane. My mouth dropped open. “Really?”

“How else are you going to get high scores in a Decathlon?”

“I always used to enter a loop at one forty and a hammerhead at one forty-five.” I laughed, feeling a little embarrassed and naïve. “But I didn’t score very well at the last contest.”

He shook his head. “You need at least a hundred and eighty miles an hour to get a good vertical upline in a Decathlon.”

“My instructor told me to keep the speed ten percent below redline to avoid damaging the plane.”

He sent me a look of pity. “That’s why you’ll never do well in competition flying rentals. You need to own your own airplane.”

There were nineteen pilots flying in the Sportsman category, the biggest category of the contest and the year. I asked a few of the other pilots about my competitors in the category. They’d flown aerobatics five, ten, even twenty years. Most were flying a Pitts, either a single-seat or a two-seat like mine. But there were a couple flying Extra 300s, sleek monoplanes that cost more than $250,000.

I was clearly out of my league flying a rental airplane in a contest after having taken my first aerobatic lesson only a few months ago. But it doesn’t matter, I told myself. I was here to have fun and learn. I was going to talk about airplanes and flying all weekend and do the best I could.

When it was my turn to fly, I pushed my plane to the starting line, awkward in my special shoes. I strapped in and waited for the signal. Bill Larson put down the radio handset atop his beige 1970s Pontiac sedan and approached my cockpit. As the contest starter, Bill had a heavy responsibility to keep the planes sequenced and separated, as well as make sure that anxious pilots didn’t overlook critical safety concerns. He’d volunteered for longer than anyone remembered at many US contests, flying out to multiple airports and paying for his own expenses.

“Harnesses and belts?” he asked in his gravelly voice, hoarse from decades of smoking.

I checked my seat belts and made sure they were secure.

“You got your sequence?”

I tapped the white card in the clear plexiglass holder on the instrument panel. “Got it!”

He leaned into the airplane. “Are you nervous?”

“Yes!” I squeaked.

He broke into a wide grin. “Then you’re gonna fly well.” He backed away and signaled with his finger to start my engine.

As I taxied out to the runway, I was so keyed up I could barely go through my checklist. I told myself to calm down, that it was just like flying in the practice box at New J.

But it wasn’t. At practice, there weren’t five judges grading every maneuver, watching every bobble, grading you against perfection. Performance was very different from practice.

Still, I forced myself to focus on routine, and on the procedures I followed every flight. I took off and circled in the holding pattern, rolling upside down once to check that my belts were secure and that my heavy shoes were pressed against the rudder pedals.

Then the panels on the ground went from red to white, and the call came over the radio that I was cleared to enter the box. The first Sportsman maneuver, as in the Basic sequence, was a spin, so I started high and slow, wagging my wings as I entered the box. I tugged the throttle all the way to the idle stop, slowly raising the nose higher and higher with the stick. The Pitts broke crisply into a stall, and immediately I pushed left rudder full to the stop and pulled the stick all the way back into my belly, and the plane entered a beautiful spin.

It felt wonderful. My movements had become precise and sharp, and somewhere in a distant corner of my mind, I noted that I was no longer scared of the spin but only nervous that my maneuvers wouldn’t score well.

I recovered from the spin, moved the stick forward to push the nose down vertical, and shoved the throttle to maximum. Now I was roaring straight at the ground. I did a quick check of my left wingtip to make sure I was exactly vertical, and then I glanced over the nose. Now! A crisp pull off the downline, just like Frank wanted, and hard back to horizontal—six g’s. I couldn’t help grinning. A perfect spin.

I had plenty of airspeed for the hammerhead. Through the plexiglass panel between my feet, I caught a glimpse of the corner box marker coming up fast. Time to pull.

Wham! Back on the stick, soaring up again into a perfect vertical. The hammerhead is my favorite maneuver, I thought as I sailed straight up into the sky, the ground dropping away from me at incredible speed, then gradually slowing, slowing, slowing. I’d stopped “interrogating the vertical,” as Louie had taught me, because Frank warned me that the judges could see the sunlight flashing off my wings and would mark me down. But it didn’t matter, because I no longer needed it. I could now sense exactly when the plane had slowed enough to pivot.

Somewhere during the long hours of practice in the dry heat of New Jerusalem, I’d finally acquired that elusive “seat of the pants” feel and become fully connected to the plane. Now it felt like an extension of my body. The airplane vibrated like it was talking to me, telling me “Now!” When the controls felt right, I applied full left rudder, opposite aileron to keep the wings level, and a hint of forward elevator. I pivoted on a dime. Now I was pointed straight at the ground.

I was exactly vertical. I held it, held it, held it, then pulled back to horizontal. Yes! Another great maneuver. Who knew how well it would score, but I had fun flying it, and that was all that mattered.

I gasped, breathing hard through my mouth and nose. My muscles trembled from tightening my quads and abs during the pulls to keep blood circulating to my brain. But I no longer noticed exactly what my body was doing, because I’d entered a flow state.

In the air, it finally felt like I belonged. It no longer mattered that I’d spent so many years fighting to prove myself as a woman and Latina in math and software engineering. It no longer mattered that I got funny looks on the ground when I taxied past a row of men. It didn’t matter that Don Schwartz had beat into me that I would always be an outsider, barely above subhuman. It didn’t matter that my marriage was still shaky, and I hadn’t told my parents I was flying. Air was the element I was born to live in. My wings trembled in the air currents like they’d grown out of the muscles in my back. This plane was my body. My body gleamed in the sun, a tiny bright being free of the confines of the earth. There was only the horizon, the wide sky, the box markers, and the singing in my heart. California was so beautiful, the Sierras to the east and the latticed fields extending into the blue distance. I’d found where I belonged. I never wanted to leave.

But eventually, the sequence came to an end with a final cross-box roll. I exited directly over the judges’ heads, at the bottom of the box, wagging the wings enthusiastically, all the way to knife edge and back, three times. I was grinning as I entered the traffic pattern and circled for a landing.

It wasn’t until much later in the day that the scores were posted. I’d been volunteering out on the line, assisting one of the judges in the Advanced category by writing down his scores on a clipboard. It was sweltering, and I’d already drained my water bottle. I was looking forward to spending time in the air-conditioned terminal.

As I jumped off the truck, my friend in the panama hat, sitting in the grass in front of the scoreboard, called out, “Congratulations!”

I looked around to see whom he was addressing.

Someone else said, “Are you Cecilia Aragon?”

When I nodded, he pointed at the scoreboard. “Congratulations. You’re in first place.”

I walked over to the board in a daze. It can’t be true. There must be some mistake. But no, there it was in blue marker in the first column of the whiteboard. My name topped the list, flying aircraft N6300V, with 1121.5 points—84 percent.

And then there were eighteen pilots below me, all their names listed in a neat column. Nick Burkett had taken second place.

I couldn’t believe it. People as surprised as I was came up and congratulated me.

“Who’s this girl who came out of nowhere to beat all the top pilots who’ve been flying for years?” I heard someone ask.

Nick Burkett congratulated me, but said, “Remember, that’s just the first flight. We still have another flight to go tomorrow!” He grinned, and I returned a shaky smile.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. My heart was racing, and I felt suffused with joy. I told myself to relax, that I’d need to get a good night’s sleep to perform my best the next day, but I was so incredibly excited that I tossed and turned in the narrow bed, listening to the rattle and whine of the aging air conditioner in the cheap hotel room.

* * *

My mind went back to a time I’d had the audacity to imagine I might take first place in a contest. During my senior year in high school, it looked like I might end up as valedictorian based on my GPA. My main competitor was a tall, blond boy who seemed to be a favorite among the teachers. I have to admit, he was polite, soft-spoken, and nice to everyone, including me. There were no weighted grades at my school, so an A in choir counted as much as an A in calculus. I noticed that my male classmate avoided the more advanced classes, while I’d taken every advanced class the school offered, including a couple that were notoriously difficult. Still, I received A’s in every class. But on a senior English elective that was widely considered easy, I was shocked to receive my first B, even though I had earned all A’s on my written assignments. The reason listed by the teacher on my report card? “Creates a disturbance in class.”

Still painfully shy, I often went days without saying a word to anybody, and I never talked in class. The two girls who sat behind me were constantly chatting. Could the teacher have made a mistake? Or did he assume it had to be the Hispanic kid, rather than the girls whose parents and grandparents had always lived in Indiana? Either way, I didn’t say anything and thought the whole thing was my fault. Because of this, I didn’t make valedictorian.

* * *

Now, as I twisted in my sheets, I couldn’t help worrying that I would do something the next morning to lose that first-place trophy. That’s what was sure to happen, wasn’t it?

I arrived at the field the next morning punchy from worry and lack of sleep. I was so afraid I’d botch my second flight, but as I taxied out, I reminded myself how much I loved flying, and how the sheer joy I felt in the air was what mattered.

I launched into the air, and all my worries dropped away as the ground disappeared beneath my wings. It was a beautiful flight, and I knew when I landed that I had flown another excellent sequence. Even though my score in the second flight was slightly less than Nick’s, I managed to hang onto my overall lead.

I finished the contest in first place.

At the banquet, the contest director, Drew Eckert, called me up to the front. “And in Sportsman first place, a little gal who flies the big Pitts very well, Cecilia Aragon.”

The big Pitts. I’d never thought of that seventeen-foot-long plane as “big.” Nor of myself as a “little gal,” but I didn’t say anything. As I stood shyly in front of the crowd of pilots, Drew presented me with the most beautiful trophy I’d ever seen, an artist-made, three-­dimensional wire sculpture of a Pitts. While second- and third-place winners received conventional plaques, first-place winners in each of the categories received one of these special creations that Drew had hired an artist to create. Pilots had been exclaiming over the unusually striking trophies since the contest began.

I set the trophy down on my banquet table, my heart still pounding with excitement and pride. gerry massey memorial aerobatic contest. sportsman first place. september 4, 1988, the trophy read.

Nick Burkett called me over from another table and said, “I’ve been waiting all year for this contest. This was gonna be the year I took first place overall. Then you show up out of nowhere and ruin my streak! And the worst part is this year they had the best trophies.” He smiled like he was joking, but there was an edge to it. “I really wanted to take one of those special trophies home! And you ruined it!”

He grinned again to show me he was just kidding, but I wasn’t altogether sure I’d want to meet him in a dark alley that night.

I’d won my first aerobatic contest, and it was a heady feeling. The thrill of winning had gotten hold of me and wouldn’t let go. Against all odds, the awkward woman who couldn’t operate machinery was unexpectedly good at aerobatic flying. But why? Did something about the precision and rhythm work well with my brain? It was a three-dimensional dance in the sky, art plus mathematics, science plus sport, requiring fast reflexes, rhythm and timing. Was I a dancer after all?

How did this happen? Didn’t my driver’s-education teacher sneer at my skills? Didn’t my classmates laugh at me for failing to ride a bike until age eleven? Didn’t I go through three instructors before I got my private pilot license?

How could I possibly win an aerobatic contest? Was it just that few people had ever believed in me before, and I’d finally learned to believe in myself ? Was that the magic I’d been missing all my life?

The next day, I flew home, my heart still higher than my altitude. I made a perfect landing at Santa Rosa and taxied back to the hangar. As I unloaded my plane, a pilot in a brand-new pair of designer jeans walked over.

“Good-looking plane,” he said. “Where did you fly?”

“I just got back from the aerobatic contest at Delano.”

He gave me a once-over. I stood a full head shorter than him even in my elevator shoes, and he snorted. “A contest, huh? Where’s your trophy?” A scornful smile played on his lips.

I popped open the turtledeck. I’d saved space for the trophy in the tiny luggage compartment by shipping my clothes home via UPS. I brought it out carefully. The wire sculpture gleamed in the afternoon sun.