An afternoon with a difference today - it's not every Sunday afternoon I get to spend doing flips, barrel rolls and loops at a few thousand feet in the air in a tiny little Cessna A152 out near Redhill. It was part of my Red Letter Days voucher from working at Spospacernge, and I got to select any of the thrill seeking options on the site. Despite being both anxious and excited about it, it wasn't nearly as frightening as I thought it may have been, but actually half an hour of excitement and a massive adrenaline rush too.

Duncs and I headed out there late afternoon, and after a bit of waiting for the plane to return from the previous flight, the pilot gave me a quick briefing of what to expect, including the turns, the flips, the rolls as well as a couple of sequences joined together. I think it was at that point I was wondering why I had decided to go ahead with this. Then we headed over to the plane - a Cessna A152, a two seater American build aerobatics aircraft. And then we took off...

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The take off was incredible smooth, and not even that quick - I guess the combined weight was next to nothing. Once at altitude, I got to 'fly' the plane briefly which was a lot like I expected, the controls being fairly reactive, but smooth throughout. Then I was told to hold on and enjoy... which involved the aileron rolls, barrel rolls, snap rolls, loop, Cuban 8 and a few of those sequences combined together. During one of those, we managed get the plane up to 4Gs, and then to finish off the flight, he took the plane into a parabola flight shape and managed to get up to 6 seconds of weightlessness, which was such a bizarre, yet amazing feeling. To prove it was truly weightlessness, he rested a pencil on the dashboard, and for those 6 seconds, it seamlessly seemed to float about in the middle of the cockpit, neither falling nor moving around, just kind of hovering. Then because we still had a bit of time left over, we managed another flight of weightlessness before coming in to land. Given the opportunity to go ahead... I wouldn't think twice about it!!