We bank to the right, a sweeping curve flying away from the airfield.  Small flecks of ice float through the cockpit.
I hear the distant contact between ground control and the disembodied pilot like a radio left on in another room.

Pilot: Ok?
Me: Fine.
Pilot: Let’s try some G’s.
Me: Ok.

We fly up at a sharp angle, I feel a pressure pushing against me, then we level off.

Pilot: That’s’ 2 G’s?
Me: Fine.
Pilot: Let’s try some more.

At 4 G’s my helmet is heavy on my head, making it hard to move.   I feel the flight suit tighten against my body, holding me, keeping my blood and organs in place.

Pilot: Let’s try a loop.
Me: Yes.

We go up, climbing, further, and further.  I breathe into the mounting pressure, as we curve in on ourselves until we reach the top &… fall backwards, flying down, our bodies describing a perfect circle in the sky.

Pilot: Everything OK?
Me: Very good.
Pilot: Now I would like to show you the Hammer.
Me: OK.

In the briefing I expressed my eagerness to try this manoeuvre.  The Pilot said he would show it to me again and again so that I could learn the Hammer.  So I would come to know what sort of hammer it was…

Straight up.  Vertical.  My flight suit fully inflates against the pull and compression - I constrict my stomach, as advised.  I can no longer move my head.  Flying sheer.  Velocity to gravity has to be exactly right before the engines can cut out.

We hang…

We’re in stasis.  Nothing but blue.  I am completely weightless.  I do not feel light - this implies a sense of gravity.  It’s as if we’re floating, but not, there’s no pressure on my body.  I just sit in this moment in the sky.
The closest feeling is that brief moment of drunkeness when the world begins to spin and you feel yourself briefly beyond yourself… but I’m in a jet fighter.  The plane begins to tip forward as the pilot starts one and then both engines.  We plummet, flying out of the drop.

Pilot: OK?
Me: Fantastic!
Pilot: I show it to you again.

 We go straight up, through the sky.
Pilot: Look at the speed dial
It reads 0 – we have stopped.  The plane, the pilot and me without weight, buoyed upwards, adrift in our MiG in Russian air space.  I thought ten minutes had gone by but in truth its nearer 60seconds.   Then anticipation kicks in for the soft fall forward before the tension ride to earth.

Pilot: I would like to show you inverted flight
Me: OK

We invert and my body loses contact with the plane.  I hang by my straps with bits of rubber jiggling on the clear canopy that separates my head from the river, houses and land above.  We hurtle along like this for a while.  It feels ludicrous and I laugh out loud.

Pilot: OK?
Me: Yes. (Still laughing).
Pilot: We will now make a low pass across the airfield and do some acrobatics.  He doesn’t give me the details...

Once out of the cockpit I feel elated, my only regret is that I didn’t take the controls.  I think to myself that in another life I could have been a fighter pilot…