Thursday, May 22, 2014

Sean D. Tucker: Bethpage Air Show Pilot Prepares to Run Circles Around the Sky in Jones Beach

 

The Wall Street Journal 
By Jackie Bischof 
May 22, 2014 

Aerobatic pilot Sean D. Tucker spent years perfecting his “Sky Dance,”  a 13-minute routine featuring more than a dozen stomach-bending maneuvers, which he will perform at the Bethpage Air Show at Jones Beach State Park May 24 and 25.

But the 62-year-old, based in California, said he was a “fearful flyer” when he first got his private pilot license in the early 1970s, carrying the trauma of a friend’s death in a sky diving accident with him whenever he flew.

Learning to roll, pitch, dive and fly upside down helped him conquer that fear, and 38 years after performing in his first aerobatic show, he estimates he’s flown around 15,000 practice flights.

“I just fell in love with what I was so afraid of,” said Mr. Tucker, who will be performing his routine, which has up to 200 movements, some iterations or repetitions of the same move, for audiences of the Bethpage Air Show at 1:40 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, just before the Navy’s Blue Angels take to the sky.

“My job – people say, ‘Oh, he’s crazy.’ Well in my business, you can only be crazy once,” said Mr. Tucker. “I am a risk mitigator; I manage risk. I try to take all the risk out of this,”  Mr. Tucker said.

“I love sharing what the sky is all about,” said Mr. Tucker, who considers the job of aerobatic pilot empowering. “We inspire people and we thrill people and we have a big responsibility not to kill ourselves in front of people” at air shows, he said. “We want to entertain, mesmerize and inspire and empower, and not traumatize.”

In addition to flying, Mr. Tucker is the founder of the California-based non-profit Every Kid Can Fly and the chairman of a program called Young Eagles, run by the Experimental Aviation Association and aimed at introducing to flight to young people, “just to light that spark within,”
Mr. Tucker said.   "We’re passionate about what flight represents and the majority of pilots are very reverent about having the privilege and opportunity to fly,” he said.

Despite the thousands of hours he’s clocked at the helm of a plane, Mr. Tucker said he has only had two flights in his career that he would consider perfect. “That feeling of perfection in the sky where the wings become your arms and you’re totally one with life is what I’m striving for,”
Mr. Tucker said.

The pilot said he knows when to back away from danger, citing one flight in Oklahoma City where he came so close to a lightning bolt that his hair stood on end. “Then I knew it was time to land,” he said. The experience also called to mind an old saying: “I’d rather be on the ground wishing I was in the sky than in the sky wishing I was on the ground,” Mr. Tucker said.


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