Flying F-104s and contre-vagues

 


Image from http://starfighter.no/web/gallery/gallery1.html




That's it. I was not accepted to enter the air force at 18 years old for a dischromatopsia at its minimum detectable threshold. Ping!

Still remember that early afternoon, 18th April 1989, a G-91T was doing some engine runs on the Napoli Capodichino airport, and i had just been fired from the medical examinations. I was sitting on some stairs, listening to the engine whining, me being simply kicked off from what i always though was my own personal reserved Line of Universe. And there was nothing on Universe could make this change. All I was asking to life since I can remeber was to strap myself to a dign aerial machine and share my existence with her. Nothing poetical, just practical, and very technical.

An improbability engine would have helped, as i think i'd already used up all the chance i had in life just by the very awkward way my parents met (therefore generating me, and btw my sister), and by walking away with no after effects from a neck injury at 14, this far from oversliding C2 on C3 and cutting my breathing reflex. Have you ever thought that some people may be using up all their share of chance just by the simple fact of being alive, with even no traceable events where they had explicit chance? Chance avoided them the need to need chance. A digression on chance and its quantity should be provided now but it just happens that i want to tell you a short resume of my story since that 18th April 1989 instead.

So, as it is clear now, I did BY NO MEANS accept such a punctual turnover: there was way too much to do and feel by living flight dynamics strapped into a dign aerial machine, those facts could not sink and vanish like that. I found myself jammed on earth looking around, suffering deep depression from this, loosing the colors of life from this... everything turned into a grey ball for years and present day life looks like a dream to me, recovering from a nightmare.

While having to deal with terrestrial logics and way of being, relationships, earning my life (who asked for THIS life?) I built interest in photography, theater photography, helping as a theater tecnician... i often asked myself why didn't I acted... it looks so clear now... i was not in the game, this ground stuff was someone's else business, either side of the stage. More or less on the same time, I learned a lot from handicapped children and adults during my civil service days and began seriously looking inside people for what's on their life. It is said that my pictures were quite good, actually.
Always chronically short of money, this time i had bought a second hand hang glider and spent 3 weeks alone on the hills, wintertime, learning to fly by myself, feeling responsible for myself, kind of responsability beginning to interest me because concerned flying. Later on i threw myself off a cliff and within a year i was seriously flying hang gliders on a weekly or less basis. By the way i had already a private pilot licence but such aluminium cages rattling in sky didn't had any appeal at all to me. Neither had those flying buses called airliners for which a lot of people loved to trade their seat from a fighter aircraft. Actually, I had just spent my 24th birthday in Prague struggling to buy a demilitarized MiG-21F. Here's the story by the way.
Now come and ask me if i've ever done such a thing for a woman.

Then i felt i was going nowhere living in the countryside with the theater stuff, felt i needed a university library where to sink my senses and learn, as i've always been curious in my life and that's the first thing that saved my life... and at the same time found a job in robotic prototyping, some university spin off people, and began to stabilize a grounded life dynamic.

By that time, a contre-vague had developed within myself: a mix of depression, incapacity to finalize thoughts on their basic dynamics (though i could strangely work very well), and a gray existence constellated by that amazing, unbelievable, overwhelming sound of fighter jet aircrafts passing above my head, remembering me of another life going parallel to mine, which was astonishingly real, as it was astonishingly true that somebody was actually flying that machine in that precise moment, which was basically everything i could recognize as familiar from the ground jungle where i was stucked. Simple? Be the first out of 150 guys in a school camp held by your favourite air force when you were 18, then win a "humble" glider pilot course held by the military, go to the medical examinations and get fired there too, file an appeal and get called back after SIX years... while on the meantime you hold a first class medical in the U.S., sufficient enough to land a "November" 747 into your home country should you like airliners, but unfortunately not sufficient enough to enter their air force. I could tell you stories about the nights i've spent on the internet, searching for a "phantom" escadrille de mercenaires flying -as they said- MiG-27, or looking for strange air forces like pakistanian, lybian, or whatever, in an unbelievable effort to find a way to fly those machines. And no, thanks, i will not fly a fighter once in a lifetime paying some guy strolling me around one hour from his front seat. Forget. More generally, just try it yourself... just state to society that you wanna fly and you find yourself immediately jammed into the need to perform a whole bunch of nonsense acts, the need to enter perfectly official and at the same time bizarre ideosyncrasias, not to mention plain bureaucracy, finicky people, attitudes, environments, and a LOT, but really A LOT of money... (today, within the microlight and sport flying environment, flying is actually made easier)... just add the "fighter aircraft" subspecie of the kind of flight you happen to be seeking for.... and you're all done. So, I don't know how, in that onyrical and nightmaresque existence, I entered a music school and ended up in front of a grand piano (a KAWAI GS-30 model, later to become my faithful study companion) doing an admission exam. And began to take classical piano lessons, and that was the second thing that saved my life. I began finalizing thoughts on something NICE, producing music, feeling part of an instrument (i recall feeling crazy tactual sensations from the GS-30 keyboard when studying 4-5 hours per day)... and yes, an aircraft is an instrument. Look at this sketch that came out from my pencil in about 20 seconds, basically without thinking

SO robotics, piano playing, hang glider flying, began to shape an entity in me, a mix of arts, humanities and pure solid technical dynamics. Musicians are a class apart. Too much to say. If you ever wanna do something great with your feet on the ground, play music as much as you can.

Time was mature enough for quitting the job and going back to study at the University, actually, Physics, because that's the way i think, i think in Physiquese, whatever does this mean... by that time i had already registered an industrial patent, the Aerodynamic Smart Skin System, something i managed to pour out from my parallel life as a flying organism :-) and still was not clear to me how to shape this big melting pot that an onyrical/nightmaresque existence was suggesting me.

A full tumbling with my Moyes XS race hang glider, constellated by a couple of seconds of inverted and stable backwards flying (no idea how such a thing was aerodynamically possible... i was there and it was happening) performed while doing intentional aerobatics, told me that hang gliding was becoming a bit tight for my -now born- aerial machine interaction. I did a 10-hours competition aerobatic training on a Pitts S2A and began to see a light out of here.

Women have a key role in my life since the big crack of 18th April 1989. Actually, i had ignored them before. Later, they shaped my terrestrial life, i learned to see and feel the world through their eyes and bodies. Or, at least, a little bit. There are a few of them who left a net fingerprint on me, above all, Marianna, with her Kieslovsky "VeroniKa" style of melting with reality.... actually it is said that she handed the style to me and got rid of it, because she didn't manage to get along with it ;-))))))

In the meantime, I had already begun the odyssey with the incomprehension with people i was experiencing when trying to develop my patent, later to become a diffuse incomprehension on the way i expressed my ideas with people in the university -above all in France during my master in Cognitive Sciences- growing up at the same time with nearly everybody i was talking to, which has become a topic fully mature concerning Aerial Creatures & Cognitive Integration, which you're surely experiencing now :-)

Cutting short, the question stands like this: what do you really wanna do in life and what the hell are you pretending to tell me you're doing or is motivating yourself, you statistically shaping terrestrial social dynamics and making things extremely complicated without actually holding real motivations. Money and money constraints are just excuses: don't hide behind a finger, come out and fight in life if you're a man :-) (I speak as i eat, from most practical, to most abstract: see my fighting to fly, see my fighting concerning science)

Given this simple defy and plunging it into the chance environment, we clear the 99% of the unsolved and misunderstood topics concerning strange paths that a few people seems to follow.

So, should not be clear enough,

  • Given the fact that i was not accepted to fly fighter aircrafts at the age of 18 years for a minor and lousy eyesight defect
  • Given the fact that i have always felt a bodily and bloody absolute attraction to strap into a dign aerial machine, go up and do unbelievable things, and this attraction has not changed since the last 17 years
  • Given overall absurdity of terrestrial people life and how it shaped de facto my terrestrial existence

this Aerial Creatures & Cognitive Integration is the outcome of a mind building up a brand new world because on the original one "he was not fit for". All my life since 18 years old has been a pursuit of a sort of my alter ego, now -at 35- entering test pilot school somewhere. I feel i've been holding my breath doing scuba diving in life for 17 years and counting. The price a mind pays for this -dealing and carving your way with the ground chatter, piles of nonsense people are presenting you pretending that is life- without becoming simply crazy is enormous, astonishing, unbelievable.

I'm now trying to make these machines and the necessary environment. If you understand this, you understand the spirit of Aerial Creatures & Cognitive Integration and maybe you'll join efforts. Strap into a dign aerial machine, turn the colors on and go fly for my life this way. You're welcome on board.

And i'm not mentioning the last couple of years i've already spent trying to set up this specific thing, this is usually referred in bad words face to face, or distilled and epurated in the "work in progress" section

If you wanna plunge into those previous years instead (the formation years of the young Testi), visit http://digilander.iol.it/karenfuxia (if any, do not miss the movie poster "Bisoux de Kemerovo") but please come back here, one young Testi is enough :-). For those of you who are scared already, my official CV is here...

And now, back to work! because as they say -no wonder!- "if you want to get something done in life, you've got to work hard"