Airshow

Capt Gyula Vari is Hungarian and flies MiG-29s for a living. He's my height, about 5'11". He has a firm handshake and a ready smile, and when I ask him to go through his show display with me he obliges at once. His English, unlike his flying, is less than perfect but when he gets to manoeuvres he can't put into words, his hands come to the rescue. Worldwide, hands are a pilot's Esperanto.

"I take off on two-zero-seven," he says, nodding across the airfield towards the main east/west runway, "and there I use full afterburner. I go into a hard pull-up. 9G."

Still mesmerised by the sight of the MiG's afterburner - two hot circles of fire with a plane attached - I don't immediately grasp the significance of what he's just said. 9G is anatomically impossible. 9G is when your body weighs not ten stone but ninety. 9G is the darkness at the very edge of the human envelope.

I offer him a forgiving smile. Language is tricky stuff. Mistakes happen all the time.

"How many G?"

"Nine"

"Nine?"

Over Capt Vari's left shoulder the wing of his MiG gleams in the sunshine. I stare at it for a moment, letting the figure settle in my memory. It's not simply the fact that this man pulls more G than the average astronaut. It's the fact that he doesn't even raise a shrug. 9G, for Capt. Vari, is pure routine. You and I take the bus to work. MiG pilots pull 9G.

Unaware of the turmoil in what's left of my brain, Cap. Vari has now reached the top of his afterburner climb and is descending through a couple of 90-degree turns into a specially modified Cobra, a snake-like dance in front of the crowd that appears to defy all the rules of aerodynamics. Emerging from the Cobra, he punches in the afterburner again, turns upside down for a while, flips rightside up, then lowers the undercarriage for a high-alpha pass. The phrase high-alpha is his cue for the right hand to come towards me, sharply angled upwards. In the SAS Survival Handbook this is the recommended way of snapping an opponent's head off and I'm still musing on just what an appropriate metaphor this is when Capt Vari hits the afterburner for the third time and powers upwards in an eighty degree climb. The climb slows and slows until the MiG is hanging in mid-air. By now, I'm back in the plot.

"Tail slide" I suggest.

Capt Vari nods. I suspect he's beginning to enjoy this little performance - impressing the hell out of a stranger without the physical nuisance of 9G - but I've no time to check because already the big hands are rolling right and left before hauling the heavy fighter into a hard afterburner turn. After this comes a pull-up and a sharp bank to the left - a mere 7G - before he balances the MiG vertically on one wing and flies a knife-edge the length of the the display line. After that comes a climb, two climbing rolls, another hard turn, plus three more rolls before he points the nose to the sky and whacks in the afterburner. Thundering upwards, he slowly lets the speed decay into another tail-slide before turning the MiG upside down for one final inverted pass and a departing wing-waggle to say bye-bye.

He pauses apologetically, as if I might be bored.

"Then I bring in flap and undercarriage," he says sweetly, "For the landing."