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I'm reading a Sports Illustrated article (hey! Quit throwing things! Kim brought it over) on aerobatics. I don't know whether to describe its overdramatism as merely silly or crossing the line into disgusting.
"One Mistake and You're Dead," reads the title. Before the main text of the article, in the subtitle, the author has already claimed aerobatics is the world's most dangerous sport. (He does this by miscounting the number of people who do it, so the number of deaths appears huge.)
The author gets just enough right that I wish I could somehow yell at him about misrepresenting the rest of it. Sorry, no, a tumble is NOT "ouside [of] physics". Sure, your stick and rudder are temporarily useless, but physics RULES THE DAY; your plane will do exactly what the summation of forces on it is telling it to do. There is no magic. And sorry, no, test-flying an aerobatic airplane without a parachute isn't machismo, it's stupidity. The way I heard the story, Williams wasn't test-flying. He survived structural failure because he was lucky and he was very, very good, not because the Virgin Mary appeared or because his hormone levels were on the extreme side of masculine. (I note the author mentions many famous names in acro, but never a woman. Hmm. There isn't a lack of female talent in this field.)
Then again, maybe this is all about how the author kinda sorta WANTS the sport to be. I note that he pushes the one edge that doesn't give. If I started a split-S as low as he claims to have, I wouldn't admit it in print in a national publication. Maybe this sport IS incredibly dangerous -- for those who are counting on luck to keep saving them!
The author gets the beauty and the poetry and the intensity and the focus right, though. Very right.
"One Mistake and You're Dead," reads the title. Before the main text of the article, in the subtitle, the author has already claimed aerobatics is the world's most dangerous sport. (He does this by miscounting the number of people who do it, so the number of deaths appears huge.)
The author gets just enough right that I wish I could somehow yell at him about misrepresenting the rest of it. Sorry, no, a tumble is NOT "ouside [of] physics". Sure, your stick and rudder are temporarily useless, but physics RULES THE DAY; your plane will do exactly what the summation of forces on it is telling it to do. There is no magic. And sorry, no, test-flying an aerobatic airplane without a parachute isn't machismo, it's stupidity. The way I heard the story, Williams wasn't test-flying. He survived structural failure because he was lucky and he was very, very good, not because the Virgin Mary appeared or because his hormone levels were on the extreme side of masculine. (I note the author mentions many famous names in acro, but never a woman. Hmm. There isn't a lack of female talent in this field.)
Then again, maybe this is all about how the author kinda sorta WANTS the sport to be. I note that he pushes the one edge that doesn't give. If I started a split-S as low as he claims to have, I wouldn't admit it in print in a national publication. Maybe this sport IS incredibly dangerous -- for those who are counting on luck to keep saving them!
The author gets the beauty and the poetry and the intensity and the focus right, though. Very right.
