Military Officer - May 2006 - (Page 54)

favorite quips is, “You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.” I’m sure that thought crossed her mind when I announced I had agreed to once again take to the skies in aerial combat. ON E O F MY W IF E ’S Barnstorming Adventures is the oldest and largest vintage air tour outﬁt in the country and operates out of McClellan-Palomar Airport near Carlsbad, Calif. Owned by two aviation nuts, Kate Lister and Tom Harnish, its ad reads, “Real dogﬁghts in real aircraft. You do much of the ﬂying. No pilot’s license required. Make an Ace of yourself.” Naturally, I was hooked. Saturday dawned bright and cloud-free, so off I roared down the freeway, sporting a ﬂight suit that hadn’t been upside down in 23 years. With quirky humor, Barnstorming Adventures’ Web site warns clients: In over thirteen years in business and after ﬂying more than 80,000 passengers, we’ve never scratched a soul. But in the same period, we’ve had forty-two people not show up for their ﬂights due to car accidents. 54 MILITARY OFFICER M AY 2 0 0 6 Whoa, better slow down! At the airport an hour later, I checked in at the pilot shop. The attendant thrust a two-page waiver at me. Customers must initial enough caveats to permit unrestricted assaults on the body. Put something in your stomach before you ﬂy. Try bananas if you think you’ll get queasy (they look and taste the same coming up as they do going down). And by all means, don’t go out on a bender the night before your ﬂight. It’s the surest way we know to guarantee you’ll blow chunks (that’s an aviation technical term). With my rights duly signed away, it was still early, so I wandered around the aircraft: two 1920s-era Travel Air 4000 biplanes, a 1941 Navy SNJ-4 (better known as an AT-6 Texan), a 1942 twin-engine C-45 Expediter, and three 1978 Varga VG-21s. The latter are the two-seater planes we’d be using. Made by Varga Aircraft Corp. and powered by a single 150 HP Avco Lycoming engine, their top speed is 174 mph. The g-limit is 6.0 positive and 3.0 negative — more than enough to compress these old bones! After a few minutes, my pilot arrived and introduced himself as Mo. Then my dogﬁght opponent appeared, looking very Italian and with two days’ stubble gracing his dark chin. “I’m Carmine,” he allowed (not his real name). Carmine, it turns out, is from New York. When I mentioned I was writing a feature on the ﬂight, he declined to give his last name, said he didn’t want his photo used either. Yikes! Lt. Brandon “Jed” Tucker would be Carmine’s pilot and safety observer. Jed is an experienced F/A-18 ﬁghter pilot on active duty with the Navy. It turns out Mo is Maj. J. Cody Allee (pronounced like Muhammad Ali, hence the nickname), also on active duty, but with the Marine Corps. He, too, is an F/A-18 pilot. They both currently have desk jobs, so Uncle Sam gave them permission to keep up their ﬂying skills by doing parttime work with Barnstorming. But

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Military Officer - May 2006

Military Officer - May 2006 Contents From the Editor President's Page Your Views MOAA Directory Rapid Fire Washington Scene Financial Forum Ask the Doctor Chapter Activities Raising Iraq Dogfight Fun Caring For Our Own Pages of History Information Exchange MOAA Scholarship Donors Member Books Advertising Index MOAA Calendar Sounding Taps Encore

Military Officer - May 2006

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