Does aerobatic pilot Paul Bennet ever feel sick? Silly question, it turns out
Thankfully for aerobatic pilot Paul Bennet that experience lasts only a few seconds. Does he ever feel sick? Silly question, it turns out.
Paul Bennet knows what it feels like to weigh 900kg, although thankfully the experience lasts only a few seconds. He also knows what it feels like to do forward flips in a plane, and to corkscrew through the air with barrel rolls that turn his visual field into a rapid flashing of Earth-sky-Earth-sky. He likes to fly straight up, vertically, until gravity brings his aircraft to a standstill, then apply some rudder to send it tumbling and cartwheeling into a dive. He’s totally at ease with flying upside down at 350km/h within cooee of the ground, in tight formation with others from his aerobatic display team, as he’s doing here at the recent Avalon Airshow near Geelong. Does he ever feel sick? Silly question, it turns out. “No,” he says. “Not ever.”
The 49-year-old father of three, from Fern Bay near Newcastle, performs at about 25 events a year with his team from Paul Bennet Airshows. His fleet includes some historic warbirds, but his favourite plane of all is the Wolf Pitts Pro he’s pictured in here. The biplane, hand-built in the US, is the highest performing aerobatic aircraft in the world, he says. It’s lightweight (450kg), with a 400hp beast of an engine, and large control surfaces that make it super agile – and difficult to fly. “It’s a very sensitive, very unstable aircraft,” Bennet says. “But that enables it to perform some very cool tricks.” Among its repertoire? The ability to roll through 360 degrees in under a second, and to hover in a vertical, nose-up position.
Whether he’s performing solo or in formation, the moves are tightly choreographed, Bennet says; it’s all about the wow factor for those on the ground. “The crowds want to see amazing tricks, and that’s what we give them,” he says. “I want there to be so much going on, they almost don’t know where to look.” He talks to the crowd as he’s flying, his voice relayed via a microphone to loudspeakers on the ground. Occasionally, the extreme G-forces reduce his commentary to grunting. Bennet can experience 10G when pulling up from a steep dive: that’s when his 90kg body gets briefly pinned down with such force that he weighs 900kg. What does that feel like? He’s a man of few words: he thinks for a second, then replies: “Yeah, it’s good!”