(This post is also available to read in Dutch.)

Over the years, I’ve become more adept at finding excuses to spend vast quantities of money under the pretext of self-development. On this occasion, I was nailing the cash-for-noise Venn diagram, as I was five thousand feet in the air over the Spanish city of Castellón, in an Extra 200. This tandem aerobatic aircraft cost about 400 euros an hour to keep its engine roaring. Some forty miles to the south was Valencia, where I live, but even on this cloudless day the city’s landmarks were just too far away to be visible. My instructor Encarna – the only female air acrobatics instructor in Spain – and I had little to complain about regarding the view, though, as we could both see the castle of Peñiscola to our north and the Columbretes islands to the east.

“Keep the wings level and increase the speed to about 140 knots. I’ll give you a count. Uno, dos, tres: up!” Encarna, strapped into the seat behind me with a full set of controls in front of her, talked me through the maneuver. With my right hand I pulled the stick back, while my left rested on the throttle. The plane responded immediately, as it was designed to do. The aircraft was developed in the 1990s by Walter Extra, a world-renowned aerobatics pilot from Germany. Dissatisfied with the planes he flew early in his stunt flying career, he decided to build his own. With a strong dose of determination, German Gründlichkeit and his engineering degree, he developed the Extra 300 and, a few years later, the Extra 200. These two models are still considered the gold standard in aerobatics today. And now it was my turn to put this Sportflugzeug through a vertical loop.

I’d barely moved the stick an inch or two and the plane immediately shot up into the bright blue sky at a 90-degree angle.  Unlike me, this machine was built to handle forces of up to 10 g, and it showed. “Now ease back on the stick a little, and maintain light pressure. Look at your left wing and find a reference point. There’s no use staring at the empty sky in front of you,” Encarna instructed through my headset. We were now fully inverted, and I could slowly see the coastline begin to fill the top of my view. My stomach felt light. A familiar sensation, like the rollercoaster drops I loved so much. “Slowly bring the nose back to level, and there you go: your first loop!”

I was hooked. We did another one, and then another. After twenty minutes, I gently brought the plane back down in a wide circle to about a thousand feet, where Encarna took the controls to prepare for our landing. There was no chance I could have landed this aeroplane without  causing serious damage to either the structural integrity of the aircraft, my own chassis, or both. The Extra is an uncompromising aircraft: great for barrel rolls, but finicky to the touch for straight-and-level flying or crosswind landings. The lack of flaps makes it hard to control, so I was glad to have Encarna in the back for the hard stuff. The emergency parachutes we were wearing would be of little use during a botched landing.

With routine precision, Encarna put the taildragger down at my home airfield, separated from the beach only by a road connecting Castellón to a nearby holiday town. The plane needed refuelling after every aerobatics flight, so we taxied to the fuel stand. I was happy I’d done my loops. As I retreated from the paved platform to the shade of the aircraft hangars, I revelled in the thought that I had another three flights left that day – and that the charge wouldn’t hit my bank balance for a few more weeks.