Two days before the flight, you’re sitting in a dentist’s chair, listening to the bi-annual lecture about your mouth and its associated problems that you can’t see, but can certainly feel as she jams and scrapes your teeth with smaller versions of the very instruments that eviscerated Mel Gibson in Braveheart. You inquire about your X-rays, mainly to see if they are up to date. Just want to make sure that there is some record of determining who you are, in case you are offered some “stick time” in the AT-6, and end up punching the plane into the dirt. You are told that your X-rays are fine, really, and what are you worried about for crying out loud?

“At what temperature human teeth melt?” you ask your dentist, hygienist, and the entire administrative staff at the front counter.

There is no definitive answer, only the audible “Uhhhhhh…” from your dentist, and the quizzical stares and closed-mouth snickers that accompany nervous moments when one person has suddenly made an entire room full of people uncomfortable.

Minutes before the flight, Chuck wraps a parachute pack around your body. He wraps straps through your legs, and cinches it all up tight (a moment that could be uncomfortable, but you realize that this could save your life, so you tell him that the thing is completely comfortable, singing soprano or not). When you put on the suction-cup-like Bose headset, the deafening roar of the 600-hp motor is suddenly muffled to mouse-fart putters. Into your ears rolls the coded chatter of the tower and the in-bound planes, rattling through your head until you eventually ignore it, to keep yourself from getting more euphoric than you already are. Your senses are alive with the vibration and power of this beast – your teeth chatter if you don’t seal your mouth completely. Your stomach is churning a little, although you’ve had nothing but water for breakfast (and very little of it, for fear of painting the cockpit with an orange colored hue of bile).

100 years ago the Wright Brothers took flight in their contraption, and wow – a hundred years ago, huh? Jeez. Chuck gets clearance from the tower and the next thing you know, you’re airborne. This plane has enough power to take off from a 100-yard strip on a carrier, you know. You elevate quickly, and it reminds you of the clickety-clack of a roller coaster climb, only not so methodical. You’re riding in the back seat, and all of the controls and gauges are duplicates of the pilot. You realize that you are, after all, the co-pilot. However, don’t touch anything.

There is a small switch on your lapel that allows you to communicate with Chuck. You know, in case you get weird or something. Before you know it, you’re running out somewhere around The Boulders Resort and he is asking you if you’re ready for a “roll.” Now you’ve got to use that device, and you tell him, in an excited voice, “Sure!”
Then it hits you. A full-G roll makes you feel like you’re riding with Yeager in the X-1. Then another roll around Bartlett Lake, and another at Horseshoe and one more for good measure in the middle of the desert.

Then comes the high-speed run at low-altitude through the canyon. Dipping, ripping, cutting through the canyon at 140 knots, with every organ you have stretching to max elasticity. You find out later that astronauts have puked on that kind of ride, and you feel pretty good about the fact that you didn’t.

You check in with Chuck (trying to be proactive about the deal, still trying to push your guts back into place) and tell him “Hey – that was great.”

“Roger that,” Chuck barks.

And then he pulls the AT-6 into a completely vertical climb that tightens your face to what it looked like in high school. Then comes the dive, and there’s nothing like looking at the earth coming at you at 150 knots, with cacti, dirt and foliage all suddenly becoming sharper and bigger, all while the plane is making this screaming noise that you usually hear in the movies before some Japanese Zero smacks into the bridge of the USS Unlucky.

The hour ride seems like 10 minutes, and when the wheels hit the ground, you’re already re-telling this adventure over in your head, trying to put together some cohesive story for that next trip to the dentist, when you try to convince them all that you’re not a sadistic loon, but just another lucky citizen.