A Struggle To Stay In Control

The northwest corner of New Jersey holds some surprises for those whose impressions of that state have been formed for them by guests on TV talk shows. Surprises like clean air and green and black fields of onions which form a quilted landscape resembling that on the far side of Omaha. Elsewhere, ridges and wooded not-quite-mountains ruffle the countryside and hold the pale morning haze in the depths of their valleys. But here, where New Jersey and New York silently meet in the middle of one of those onion patches, the land is as flat as a tablecloth. And where the land is the flattest and the furrows the straightest, is where you are most likely to find Leo Loudenslager.

If he doesn't answer his phone and his hangar door is open, Loudenslager will be up there, 1,000 feet above the fertile earth, rifling through the air in his Stephens Akro, carving the sky into cubes with angles so sharp you could shave on their edges.

Loudenslager, 32, is the U.S. aerobatic champion and the farmers under his practice area have grown to know him, or at least his tiny dark blue plane, well. Two years ago Loudenslager and his new wife Suzy moved from Riverside, Conn. to Sussex, N.J. for only one reason: those rectilinear fields are the best area for practicing aerobatics within commuting distance of LaGuardia Airport where, as a commercial airline pilot, Leo flies in a much more subdued manner.

Even on the ground the first impression one has of Loudenslager is that of a man in tight control. He moves quickly, on the balls of his feet, like a hurdler or maybe a karate master. His hair is un-fashionably short, even for an airline pilot, and his conversation is articulate but economical. Little of Loudenslager's personality is in the mold of past aerobatic champions. Almost to a man, they have been outgoing, gregarious individuals, possessed of what writers like to label "charisma." Tom Poberezny, the 1973 national champion, who began competing at the same time as Loudenslager—1971—says of the fledgling aerobat, "It wasn't that Leo was exactly unfriendly. He was pure business and didn't say a word to anybody. He was extremely hard to get to know."

Leo Loudenslager doesn't fit the mold in a lot of ways besides personal intensity. For one thing, he grew up in Columbus, Ohio and it is common knowledge that if you aren't from the South (or maybe California or Wisconsin), you can't fly aerobatics. Moreover, Loudenslager's airplane isn't a biplane.

From the beginning of his career, Loudenslager made it clear to the cliquish world of aerobatics that he would be doing things his way, and one of the key ingredients of "his way" is flying a monoplane. That was a radical decision because biplanes—specifically the Pitts Special—ruled the aerobatic roost in this country.

When Loudenslager showed up at the national contest in 1971, he had previously flown in only one other aerobatic event and didn't intend to enter the advanced category. But he changed his mind at the last minute and decided to bite off the biggest chunk first by leaping right into unlimited competition to slug it out with the proved winners. He says, "Those two practice weeks leading into that contest were the worst of my life." Loudenslager doesn't use hyperbole and he doesn't smile at the recollection. "I was scared, the plane was very unstable in some maneuvers and I was flying so hard and pulling so many negative Gs that the broken blood vessels in my eyes made them look like a rabbit's. I thought I was dying."

He didn't fly as badly as-he felt because he came in ninth in a 14-man field, an amazing feat for a rookie in an unproved design. In 1975, after four years of cut-and-try development on the airplane, Loudenslager and his much modified Stephens Akro became national champions, unseating the Pitts after an eight-year reign. This month, at Sherman, Texas, Loudenslager will be trying to become the third pilot to win back-to-back national titles.

Much of Loudenslager's success has been the result of a brand of discipline that overlaps everything he does, from maintaining his weight at 160 pounds to working long nights on his airplane. He needed all the discipline he could muster when, seven months before the 1975 nationals, he discovered a cracked main spar in the wing of his plane. There was no way to repair it to his satisfaction; the only solution was to build an entirely new wing. Loudenslager took this opportunity to make massive modifications in the airframe. So, with his chances of winning the title and also making the U.S. squad that would be traveling to Kiev for the world championships this past July hanging in the balance, Loudenslager and his partner, Jim Roberts, closed their lives to the rest of the world and proceeded to build what was essentially a new airplane. The effort was worth it. Loudenslager scored 19,657 points at the nationals to beat his nearest rival, Henry Haigh, who flew a Pitts, by 106 points.

Still, in terms of motivation, Loudenslager is not unique in his sport. Drs. Bruce Ogilvie and Champe Poole, the team that did psychological profiles of hundreds of successful athletes in many different sports, have characterized aerobatic pilots as "...ambitious, organized, autonomous, with unusual capacity to apply themselves over long periods...a collection of extremely driven men." They would have to be driven men to throw themselves so completely into a sport that ranks with frog jumping for obscurity and financial rewards and combines the physical punishment of a torture chamber with the cost of Formula I racing.