You work hard. if anyone deserves a great escape, it's you. So forget books, movies, concerts. How'd you like to pull six Gs while strafing another human at 250 mph, then watch his shattered carcass spiral down in flames?
Well, for $795 you can. OK, the bullets are just lasers, but the plane is real, you're actually at the controls, and when the shots hit there's a testosterone whump and a trail of smoke.
The plane is a high-performance Marchetti SF-260 owned by Air Combat USA, and you fly beside a genuine fighter jock with a goofy nickname like Mad Dog or Loopie. Loopie takes it up to shooting altitude, then hands over the stick. You maneuver behind your target, yank on the trigger, and splatter him virtually onto the ground.
When I got to the airport, the other guy in the room introduced himself as a milkman (maybe that was his goofy nickname), and kept scowling at me as if he'd rather shoot me right here right now instead of waiting until we were in the air. We stuffed ourselves into flight suits. Mine was way too small. Someone cinched me in so tight I was bent over and straining to breathe, and to hobble me even further, strapped on a bulky parachute and a putrid, greasy helmet.
I climbed inside the plane, expecting a state-of-the-art glass cockpit. Instead it resembled the worn, bare-metal dashboard of a clapped-out Mexican bus after a couple odometer flips. In five seconds we and the Milkman's plane were airborne, and in ten I was violently, uncontrollably, unimaginably airsick.
I usually laugh at turbulence. In storm-tossed skies, with a 747 fuselage creaking as if it's just starting to come apart, I smile and enjoy the ride while others around me are weeping and openly praying. But this was different.
Maybe it was the tourniquet-tight, sweat-drenched suit, the brutal heat, or the bondage straps scrunching me into a ball, but I was seconds from blowing chunks. As much as I had dreamed about this flight, fantasized endlessly about juking through the clouds in wild pursuit of a fleeing bogey, guns rattling, stick throbbing in my hands, all I wanted now was to land. Pronto.
Unfortunately that wasn't the plan. It didn't matter that I was choking down magma-like puke, begging to turn around, and that I would have cheerfully paid another $795 on the spot to head for the runway. They needed me up there to be the Milkman's target. My pilot cracked open the canopy an inch. Hot, gagging exhaust instantly filled the cockpit. We circled lazily, a sitting duck, and every time the Milkman poured it on, some gizmo under my seat belched more oily "we're-going-down" smoke into my face, nauseating me to higher levels of distress, until I was a twitching, whimpering mess.
When we finally landed, I oozed out of the cockpit and made my way to the car. As I pulled out of the parking lot I noticed that right in front of me was—the Milkman. I lined him up in imaginary crosshairs on my windshield. Die, Milkman, die!!
