Al’s pulled the power back, so I can hear him now. “Oh, this is too easy – he’s got way too much overtake.” RATS, it turns out, is a helicopter pilot, and has underestimated his total energy trying to come around us in a descending turn. Al converts our speed to altitude and reverses sharply in a wingover. Five seconds later, RATS is pinned as squarely in our sights as a moth on a collector’s table. Al calls out the obligatory shot and breaks off – he’s not a man to rub his fighter pilot experience in the face of a fellow instructor.

My brain is still trailing about 30 seconds behind all of this, just now reaching the God-I-wish-I-had-a-camera-there stage when Al hands the controls back to me. But there’ll be other camera opportunities – Al didn’t want me to be distracted from the experience of my first Spitfire flight.

The sky, after weeks of rain, has opened up into a storybook blue, laced with tufts of late morning cumulus. Looks just like a James Dietz painting. After a couple of Dutch rolls to demonstrate the plane’s yaw (omigodomigodI’mflyingaSpitfire) Al tells me to aim for one of the open patches and climb on up to 5000′.

I ask if I can do some steep turns (“Sure – whatever you want.”) and I haul it on over to 60 degrees. It comes over immediately. There’s no hesitation, and practically no force on the stick – it just comes over. Just like that. I tug a bit to bring us around, and suddenly my head and arms are heavy. It takes a few seconds in my insta-groggy state to realize that we’re pulling upwards of three G’s. But I just…? I remember flight manual: “neutral stability, very light on the controls.” You just think about which way you want it to go, and it’ll slam you into the seat in its haste to get there. Not even the Pitts felt like this.

Al wants to demonstrate wingovers. He warns me “These aren’t the mild ones they teach you back in the US.” I contemplate telling him not to worry, that I’m used to doing them far more than the 30 degree lazy 8’s specified in the US Practical Test Standards. But I hold my tongue, and I’m glad I do.

“Up we go,” he narrates, “feet in the sky, then roll to around 120 degrees and pull to maintain 1G positive.” I look up at the neat little fields of Cambridgeshire above my head, then we pivot and are pointed at the ground again, diving past 220 mph in a graceful, swooping recovery. I’m speechless.

“Now you do one.”

It takes a couple of times before I get it right, but right side up will never be so fun again.

Al talks me through a couple of loops and rolls, but the Gs are getting to me, and it’s time to return for some demonstration landings.

Okay. I don’t think I’m going to talk about the landings. He demonstrated a few, and I tried a few. He had kind words for my freshman effort and called my last two landings “good”. But I didn’t have the heart to ask if that was in the traditional pilot sense of “any landing you can walk away from”.

Tomorrow, we’re going to do it again. Three sorties, if I can last that long. And I promise – on at least one of them, I’ll bring along a camera.

[Okay, that’s enough writing for today. I am so wiped out.]

BTW: not me, below, but RATS taking off a little earlier in the other Spitfire: