Outaouais’ Carol Pilon likes nothing better than hanging out on the wing of her airplane

OTTAWA — There’s a feeling Carol Pilon gets when she’s out on the wing of her 1940 Boeing Stearman, the vintage biplane she’s nicknamed Royal Rhapsody, as it dives, loops, rolls and climbs through her 15-minute wingwalking performance.

“The whole world is mine,” she says. “It’s like I’m the only thing up there, and the only thing that matters to me is the next thing I’m doing; the next handhold, the next foothold. It is so blissfully liberating to be that responsible for every single little movement you make, and at the same time not have to care about anything else.

“I imagine this is what dictators are aiming for.”

Growing up in rural Outaouais — she currently lives in Masham, near Wakefield — Pilon, who performs this weekend at the Wings Over Gatineau-Ottawa air show, was unaware that people did such a thing; that aviators had been performing stunts on airplane wings almost as long as there were airplane wings. American pilot Ormer Locklear was the first, in 1917, and Charles Lindbergh, in the 1920s, was the best known.

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