Thursday, February 28, 2008

Romeo Whiskey Whiskey

On Sunday we went flying over Sydney coast line and buzzed Sydney harbor (A little background: Heather's boyfriend Ellis is in the Australian Navy and one of his friends -Scott- is a chopper pilot). Although it has been raining off and on in Australia, we had perfect blue bird skies for the flight. We took off from Nowra (about 2 hours south of Sydney) and headed up the coast, past the Gong and Bondi beach and into Sydney Harbor where we were flying a mere 1000 feet above the opera house and the bridge.
Once we were over the ocean again (and a safe distance from the Harbor) Scott took us into 2 G spins, zero gravity bumps and stalls. We have the zero gravity bumps on film so Ill post a link to the youtube sight when its available. Basically, a zero g bump is when you gain altitude with the nose of the plane aimed towards the sky, then push the nose down so you're aimed for the ground and loosing altitude. The moments between gaining altitude and loosing altitude is the zero g part. In the video I'm holding a pen in my hand and you can see it float out of my hands and levitate (followed by screaming). A stall is when we lay off the throttle and don't have enough speed to stay in the air and then the plane starts to plummet. This typically a very dangerous thing to do but since we were with a professional pilot we felt pretty safe (although Heather and I still found it necessary to scream). I also have a video of this (link to follow).
On the way home Scott let me fly the plane (INCLUDING landing!) and I did all the radio calls into Nowra traffic. You better believe I threw a "niner" into my calls. It went something like this:
"Nowra Traffic, This is Romeo Whiskey Whiskey (we were on a cescna with - for lack of a better word - plate numbers RWW). We are NINER miles due North heading for 08."
It was hysterical!

Pictures and links to the video will be posted soon.

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