I am strapped to a pole on top of the wing of an aircraft old enough
to be my grandfather, which is in a nosedive towards the earth 1,000ft
below. As I plunge towards the blurry green Gloucestershire field, my body
battered by the 3G force, the 150mph wind feels as though it is trying to
rip my head off.
My neck muscles are straining like a German shot putter’s and my jowls are
flapping about by my ears. Spit and snot are smeared across my face, which
is frozen in a terrified shriek – a bit like Edvard Munch’s The Scream with
flying goggles on.
Except I can’t scream, because I can’t breathe, and I am convinced that the
last thing to go through my mind before I die will be the 2,100rpm propeller
inches from my feet.
For someone with a fear of heights, wing walking is not fun. In fact it is the
most horrible sensation I have experienced. As we get closer and closer to
the ground in this awful death plunge, I squeeze my eyes closed and pray.
It seems a lifetime ago that I was warm and cosy in the charming company of
Vic Norman, the pilot, in a converted shed in Gloucestershire. He has been
doing this since 1987 – when he founded AeroSuperBatics – and he is solely
responsible for bringing back wing walking after the Civil Aviation
Authority banned it in 1933 for being too dangerous. AeroSuperBatics worked
out a way of maintaining safety standards in biplanes and became the first
company to be granted permission for performers to climb out of the cockpit
and onto the wings.
Norman’s team of pilots, engineers and wing-walking babes now has four Boeing
Stearmans, the two-seater biplanes introduced by the Stearman aircraft
division of Boeing in Wichita, Kansas, in 1934.
“We fit them with bigger engines so that we get a better rate of roll,” Norman
says. “Stearmans are ideal for airshow work, as they fly as low as 30ft and
as high as 1,000ft.” Business is booming. Norman and his team fly round the
world, delighting the crowds from Nice to China to Dubai; the season runs
from May to November.
Early aviators did something similar almost 100 years ago. In the early part
of the century, flying was something you did only if you were rich. But that
changed after the first world war with an influx of trained pilots who
didn’t fancy going back to menial jobs.
With plenty of war-surplus biplanes cheaply available, these entrepreneurial
airmen began touring the country, bringing the thrill of flying to people
for whom the idea was as unattainable as space travel is for us today.
They would fly to a town, circle it a few times and then put up a sign and
charge people for a joyride. The pilots cultivated an image of louche rogues
who kicked up a storm wherever they went. Sir Alan Cobham, a member of the
Royal Flying Corps and a pioneer of long-distance aviation, decided that
just flying about wasn’t getting the crowd’s attention, so he decided to
climb onto the wing mid-flight. This proved something of a crowd-pleaser,
and wing walking was born.
Wing walkers were the equivalent of the stars of the television programme
Jackass today, each trying to outdo the other with ever more daring stunts.
They admitted that the point of their trade was to make money from the
crowds on the possibility of someone dying.
In America the same thing was happening, but there the pilots had a novel take
on the idea. Ethel Dare was the first woman to change planes in the air.
Pretty and petite, she was billed as the “Queen of the Air” or the “Flying
Witch” and had been a flying trapeze performer with the Barnum &
Bailey circus.
Dare was clearly a lunatic – one of her favourite tricks was standing on the
edge of a wing and suddenly falling backwards into space with only a length
of rope to save her, before climbing back, hand over hand, to perform other
stunts. Her speciality was the “iron jaw spin”, when she dangled from the
end of a rope by a special mouthpiece clenched between her teeth and twirled
in the plane’s prop wash. Dare plunged to her death in 1933.
I was contemplating this salutary tale, and thinking that I would give the
iron jaw spin a miss, when Norman asked whether I would like to do a loop
the loop. And for some reason – perhaps because I was getting carried away
with potential nicknames (Emma the Eagle, the Flying Angel) – I said yes.
After a quick safety briefing it is time to put my money where my big mouth
is. I follow the wing-walking babe Danielle Hughes, as elegant as a
butterfly in her pink Lycra, into the beautiful, still winter morning. I
have taken the team’s advice to “wrap up warm” so I look like an Arctic
explorer as I waddle behind Danielle towards the little aeroplane.
She explains the correct way to mount the flimsy-looking biplane – one foot in
the wrong place and I could go through the fabric-covered wooden wings. She
manoeuvres her way past the cockpit and up onto the upper set of wings with
balletic grace while I heave myself up behind her with all the elegance of a
fat person trying to get out of a swimming pool.
However, it’s not until she has strapped me to the rig and shown me the
emergency release catch that the magnitude of what I am about to do hits me.
As she gives me a jaunty thumbs-up (I have earplugs in and can hear only the
sound of my Darth Vader-like breathing) and prepares to dismount, I grab
her. “Don’t go,” I squeak. “Are you sure you’ve done it up properly? It
feels a bit wobbly.” I am so terrified I think I might cry.
Then Norman fires up the plane. The propeller is whizzing by my legs like a
giant food mixer, and the vibrations through the plane make it feel as
though I am sitting on an industrial washing machine on spin cycle.
We set off across the bumpy field, and I think of the elephants – I am doing
this to raise awareness for the Elephant Nature Foundation in Thailand (see
tinyurl.com/3afa4b for more details). This takes my mind off things until
the plane takes off.
It is freezing up there. My forehead feels like I have butted a block of ice –
better than any Botox – and the wind takes my breath away so I have to turn
my head to the side and gulp mouthfuls of air like a fish out of water.
Because Norman can’t see me, I have to stretch my arms like Kate Winslet on
the bow of the Titanic and give him the thumbs-up so he knows I am okay. But
I don’t feel okay: my senses are overloaded and the adrenaline is giving me
a headache.
It’s like riding a motorbike at 200mph in the sky and is really rather
unpleasant. Then we start to climb, higher and higher, and at 1,000ft I stop
feeling scared and start enjoying myself, taking in for the first time the
stunning views of the Gloucestershire countryside.
But then with a jolt I suddenly realise why we are climbing so high. “Oh no,
oh please God, no.” Norman is getting ready to do a loop the loop.
It is the anticipation I can’t stand, and bracing myself in the rig and
waiting for the plunge into the loop is far and away the most frightening
experience of my life. It is almost a relief when we plummet into the
nosedive. Almost.
Just before my heart stops beating for ever, and with an incredible surge of
G-force, we pull out of the dive and head towards the heavens. And then
everything slows right down and, as my whole world is turned upside down, I
experience an incredible moment of serenity as though I am being held in the
arms of the angels.
This feeling lasts only briefly, and then I feel incredibly, overwhelmingly
sick. It seems hours before Norman brings the plane down but in fact it is
only seconds.
As we bump across the field after landing, I am slumped in the harness as
though dead, limp as a rag doll and dribbling on my chest.
My body is shaking, and when Norman releases me from the harness, my legs give
way. So much for Emma the Eagle.
Am I pleased I did it? Yes. Would I do it again? Not even if you offered me
Brad Pitt glazed in honey clutching a million pounds.
Those magnificent men (and women)
The history of wing walking stretches back to 1920s America, where it was a
highly popular spectator sport.
During airshows, daredevils would perform acrobatic tricks as the plane they
were on swooped at low altitudes. Some wing walkers even crossed over,
mid-air, to other aircraft.
As the sport grew, performers increasingly sought to outdo each other, which
resulted in a number of accidents and fatalities, including the death of the
first female wing walker, Ethel Dare. This led, in 1936, to a ruling by the
US government that made it illegal to wing walk at altitudes below 1,500ft,
in effect killing the sport for spectators.
In the UK, wing walking was revived by Vic Norman, when he founded
AeroSuperBatics in 1987. Norman had to gain a special dispensation from the
Civil Aviation Authority in order to allow his performers into the air; they
now operate by a strict set of safety guidelines. Walkers must be
professionally trained before taking part, assuming they first pass
stringent physical tests. They must wear a safety harness connecting them to
the plane, and when they are atop the wings they must be strapped into a
safety rig.
The planes, which fly at up to 160mph, are not allowed to fly lower than 30ft,
although they will soar as high as 1,000ft to perform loops, where riders
experience forces as great as 3.5G.
