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It's all about finding the right line in 370km/h air racing

October 10, 2009 Edition 1

Dylan Muhlenberg

Flying is freedom. Hah! Only if you wear your underpants as outer wear. You line up here just so that you can line up there, all the time fatuously following a cordoned-off maze that makes you zigzag between points A and B.

Inevitably there'll be a problem with your flight, due either to overbooking or to delays. Cable ties? Now why would the airline make it any more difficult for its employees to rifle through your luggage, hmm?

Then you're crammed into your seat and told to put your seat belt on and turn your iPod off before being subjected to tedious safety procedures. It's then that you notice passenger planes aren't designed for people.

You land. At passport control I'm told there's a problem with my visa. A policeman wearing a baby-blue safari suit punctuated with gold buttons, gold epaulettes and gold rope takes me to a room and seats me between a Filipino and a guy from Senegal. He puts my backpack next to their plastic packets. My retinas are scanned, my passport taken. After nine hours in the same chair I'm told I can leave. No reason is given and no apology offered. Flying isn't freedom. Flying is about control.

Not so, though, for Glen Dell, who has taken extended leave from SAA, where he's employed as a pilot, to fly in the Red Bull Air Races. Air racing is nothing like the afore-described flying. It's like F1 racing in the sky, but instead of mollycoddled drivers you have each pilot acting as his own boss, team manager, sponsorship director, press officer, receptionist, mechanic... Flying the plane is just the fun part.

And at 370km/h you'd better believe that flying these planes is fun. Pilots must navigate the 6km-long, 20m-high low-level circuit of specially designed inflatable pylons (air gates) as fast as possible and in the correct position (either knife or level flying). Precision is crucial because any mistakes incur penalty seconds, which are added to the pilot's time.

Like downhill skiing, air racing is all about finding the right line. Go too wide or miss a sharp edge and those extra seconds can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Still, as fast as it is, the real hero here is G-force. G-force is an object of acceleration relative to free fall. A roller coaster will be around 3.5G, a Formula One car braking will emit 5G (most of us would black out at 5G) and a fighter jet's turn will be at around 9G. Air-race rules limit pilots to 12G. More than 12G hurts the body and can rip planes apart, so there's instant disqualification against transgressors as safety is key.

Abu Dhabi is a place where you have a guy paying $14 million (about R112m) for a licence plate with the number "1" on it, so it makes sense that the city that sponsors last year's winner and this year's favourite, Hannes Arch, hosts the first event of the year. Around 450 million TV viewers tune into the Red Bull Air Race.

It's Glen Dell's second year flying in this competition. The son of an airline pilot, Dell has been flying for over 30 years, with more than 23 000 hours in 250 types of aircraft. His crowning achievement is 2004's Aerobatic World Championship title in Sweden.

The South African pilot's hangar has a cordoned-off area where there's a stack of postcards on top of a table with different-coloured koki pens for signing them. Behind Dell are 14 cans of Red Bull and two bottles of water, which he's set out like the course. Right now the former world aerobatic champion is sitting in the little office space watching footage of his practice run. "Went too high on that one... Should've banked left earlier there..."

After a lacklustre rookie year, Dell spent the off-season overhauling his Edge 540, installing a new engine, propeller, cowling, fairings and spats. Dell studied Arch, who went from 10th in his rookie season to first in his sophomore year, and refined his fitness programme.

"If you're one kilogramme overweight and pulling 12G, that's an extra 12kg you're lugging around the sky," he explains.

Dell goes into a simulator once every two months so as to stay current on the system, because if he doesn't show a result soon he's going back to commercial piloting. "A friend of mine asked me what his son should choose to fly in the air force to become the best possible pilot. So I told him to fly helicopters or light aircraft, which sounds like a strange answer when someone has the opportunity to fly Mirages, but that's what real flying is about.

"I wouldn't admit to anybody that I fly an Airbus. I'm fully aware of the fact that times have changed. It's really a positive 'climb, gear up, auto pilot in' kind of thing."

Read the full interview and much more in the current edition of GQ, on sale now.

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