A Struggle To Stay In Control

"It used to be I'd be pushing the nose under into a maneuver needing high negative Gs and I'd hear myself beginning to whimper from the pain," Loudenslager says. "I'd keep telling myself I'd do just one more maneuver and then I'd come down. Some days I'd keep saying that through 150 maneuvers."

There are few sports that exercise every muscle in the body, eyelids to ankles, as does aerobatics. In a pull-up to do a vertical roll, a pilot may have 8 Gs grinding him into his seat, making it impossible for him even to lift his hand. Under those kinds of forces there is no part of the pilot's body that isn't being stretched and strained to the limit. Blood is being drained from his head, and in order to slow its downward rush many aerobatic pilots will tighten their neck muscles by screaming as loud as they can. The average person begins to lose his vision at 4 Gs positive, at 6 Gs most are blind from the loss of blood in the optic system, but every time a pilot like Loudenslager goes up he routinely pulls 8 and 9 Gs and still threads invisible needles with his airplane.

However, the force that separates the men from the supermen is the negative Gs that occur during "outside" maneuvers, those that throw the pilot against his belt and threaten to cram all his innards into his cranial cavity. There is no cute little isometric trick to slow this process or ease the pain.

"The maneuver that hurts the most," says Loudenslager, "is the vertical outside snap roll." This is done flying straight up at near terminal speed (210 mph). At the apex the airplane is put into a violent roll. "I pull maybe 8 Gs positive going up and all the blood is on the way down. Then bang! The plane goes into its roll and suddenly it feels as if my head is going to come off. The pressure is beyond description. I'm looking out at the wing tip when I do the maneuver, so my inner ear and neck muscles are 90 degrees to my body. For a second, as everything is flashing past, my throat is being filled with lungs and stomach. It would be easy for me to lose orientation. If I do, I won't have the slightest idea where to stop the maneuver."

As one watches the airplane perform, knifing cleanly up and down, making perfect vertical and 45-degree lines to the horizon, none of the pain of the creative process is evident. The maneuver is so beautiful it is easy for a spectator to forget that inside that speeding projectile is a man clawing to maintain control, knowing that only a few hundred feet away the ground is the final boundary of his margin of error.

Despite the fact that nearly 750,000 noncommercial pilots are registered in the U.S., this country did not become a contender in international aerobatics competition until the late '60s. But with the development of a strong American team, the biannual world contests have taken on a decidedly East vs. West flavor. At Hullavington, England in 1970 Bob Herendeen, then U.S. champion, was in the process of battling it out nose to nose with Igor Egorov of the Soviet Union when an engine failure and rules interpretations caused him to be penalized and reduced to second overall. The Russian came in first. In 1972 at Salon, France, the U.S. won the team competition, and Charlie Hillard, a Ford dealer from Fort Worth, became the first American world champion.

Still, the lack of money and recognition has sometimes been an embarrassment for the U.S. team. In 1974 Poland was originally scheduled to hold the world contest but bowed out, making it America's turn. But U.S. aerobatic buffs couldn't come up with the required million dollars to host the event and it was canceled.

Says Loudenslager, "Our primary problem has always been one of money. We think we can bring home the bacon if we get to the contests, but sometimes we wonder if we are going to have to walk to do it." The extent of the U.S. team's financial bind is probably best seen in the fact that it was transported across the Atlantic for this summer's world contest by a German airline because it offered the best price.

Other teams, especially those from the Eastern bloc, don't have such problems. The Russians, for instance, completely subsidize their team. Its members are given jobs that allow them to practice daily and the YAK-50 airplanes they fly are owned, designed, built and supported by the government. This is in contrast to the U.S., where, in 1972, national champion Herendeen couldn't fly with the national team at the world championship because his employer, an airline, refused to grant him a leave of absence.

Considering how Loudenslager and the five other members of the U.S. national team fared in Kiev, perhaps Herendeen's experience would have been a blessing this year. "The officiating was something you had to see to believe," says Don Taylor, the U.S. member of the judging panel. "Besides obvious favoritism toward Russian and other Eastern-bloc pilots, the flagrant coercion, scheming and collusion of the Eastern judges was absolutely unreal. For instance, on the four-minute exercise, the runner carrying the completed score sheets to the tent for tallying would first show them to the Russian judge. He would review the scores the other judges had given before marking down his own. That's pretty open cheating."