This would be the dream. Flying, with total control and supreme agility. Like Superman with better steering. Skimming sparrow-like along Salinas fields just feet from the golden grass; spiraling straight up from the ground in a tight column of 360s.

Showcopter 3 pilot Bob Bolton’s confidence—his left hand’s comfort with the L-shaped control lever, and his “I could take it a lot closer to this power pole, but I’m not going to” comments—helps foster this dreamlike detachment from realities like gravity and wind.

As 40,000-plus fans found out over three days at the California International Airshow in Salinas last weekend, Bolton’s mastery of the Robinson R44 helicopter is fun to watch. He and Showcopter leader Jim Cheatham did the upward spiral (the “screw-up”), flew in one direction with their aircrafts pointed in different directions (“the cockeyed formation”), and dropped Flying Elvises from above.

To be along for the ride is…well…unearthly.

Bolton pulls his lever almost imperceptibly, and the chopper leans sideways—giving passengers peering out the window a straight-ahead look at either the grass or sky at 90 mph. Meanwhile, he waxes metaphoric on how to acclimate to the aircraft’s controls.

“I tell people who are learning to go home and stand a broomstick on their palm and keep it balanced,” he says through the headset intercom. “It’s small, little corrections, not sudden movements.”

The Prunedale resident is not an instructor, but he is a veteran crop duster, having spent 25 years in the ag industry in the Salinas area where he grew up. He says on any given day a sprayer makes literally “thousands” of turns—like the one he swoops the chopper through to avoid some electrical lines, pivoting and diving back low over the practice field in the space of two seconds.

Through the domed windshield of the helicopter, Bolton points out various crops. Then, as reflexively as an eyelid, he tips the cyclic lever with his right hand just enough to dodge a bird. Bolton says the Robinson 44’s nimbleness is one of two essential qualities that make it feasible for them to be the only helicopter airshow performers in the country.

“Without the R44, we don’t do airshows, period,” he says. “It’s the economics of it and the maneuverability. It’ll go sideways and backwards at 40-50 knots [about 45-55 mph]. Most helicopters can’t do that. Either that or they’re multimillion dollar aircraft, and that’s a little expensive.

“This aircraft is a lil’ over $320,000 or $350,000.”

With each of its fluid maneuvers, it becomes easier to accept the fact that humans can float over a strawberry field backwards. It’s a familiar, this-is-happening-but-something-isn’t-quite-normal feeling that’s ordinary only in dreams.

~ ~ ~ ~

One of Bolton’s passengers has never dreamed about flying—far from it. Moreover, my colleague Stuart Thornton had self-prescribed this trip as a treatment for one of his nightmares: heights.

The first “treatment”—falling from a plane with a parachute—was unsuccessful. Thornton leapt out of a plane in 1995 with his skydiving instructor on his back and immediately did something he had been instructed not to.

“I went fetal,” he recalls. The tuck sent the two into a spinning ball of panic.

“All I saw was sky, ground, sky, ground,” he says, his voice wavering with intensity. (He later reveals that he didn’t immediately remember these details because of the terror shooting through his system.) “The guy on my back was yelling at me, pulling at me to reposition. I began elbowing him in the ribs.

“That’s when he punched me in the face.”

The first thing he remembers seeing was the blood on his hand. “It snapped me back. I got into position and the parachute came out. And since I didn’t remember anything, it all seemed wonderful, floating there. Only the coach was yelling, “I have a wife and kids! Fuck you! I have a fucking wife and kids!”

On the ground, Thornton received help regaining his memory of the traumatic fall. The feeling between his instructor and himself, meanwhile, wasn’t very dreamy or curative. Thornton says, “It was awkward.”

~ ~ ~ ~

Thornton did little to betray his nervousness during the Showcopter’s “dead-stick landing,” a powerless, auto-rotation descent with which Bolton started off his demonstration. In fact, Thornton is solid throughout.

On the Salinas Airport tarmac after the stunts, he looks triumphant—flying beats falling.

“I felt way better about that experience,” Thornton says.

Bolton says he’s never dreamt about flying himself. Later he admits, “I don’t like heights either.”

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