She Flies Like a Girl

She Flies Like a Girl

Jacquie Warda is a daredevil in the cockpit.

Performing the aerial gymnastics required of an air show pilot takes a special breed—someone who isn’t going to lose her lunch doing a barrel roll high above a crowd of screaming fans. Danville’s Jacquie Warda is such a daredevil. Appearing at 10 to 15 air shows a year all over the world, Warda has been on the circuit for 12 years now. She doesn’t consider herself an adrenaline junkie and readily admits to a mundane lifestyle out of the cockpit, complete with cooking dinner and playing golf. She tries to get airborne as often as possible. “I would fly before I would eat,” she says. One thing Warda is passionate about is hanging out after her performances to talk to attendees, especially women, but not just those interested in becoming pilots. “Because there are so few women doing what we do, we inspire other women to be great,” says Warda. “If we can do what we do, you can do what you want to do. Go try it.” Inspired—not to be an air show performer, but to give making a cheese soufflé a shot—I rang Warda recently for some much needed encouragement.

Paul Kilduff: Exactly how many women do what you do?

Jacquie Warda: There’s about five of us.

PK: Really?

JW: Yeah, it is very unusual. No. 1, it doesn’t appeal to very many men, and even fewer women. The women that do what we do are completely Type A personalities.

PK: So, do you consider yourself to be a stunt pilot?

JW: No, aerobatic pilot. We don’t use the word stunt. Stunts are something circus guys do that has an unknown outcome. There’s nothing unknown about what we do. It’s pretty high risk, so we don’t do anything that’s unknown. If there were a million of us, nobody would even notice. And nobody notices when you’ve got an air show full of guys. Everybody assumes that’s what guys do. We do exactly what they do. Sometimes we do it better. We are better looking, that’s for sure.

PK: Sorry I called you the “s” word—I didn’t know.

JW: That’s OK. People will always use it, but we all try to change it. A stunt is something we see Evel Knievel doing, and he’s not quite sure of the outcome. He’s hoping for a good outcome, but he’s not quite sure, because he has never practiced it. What we do in front of an air show is practiced and practiced until we’re blue in the face so there’s no unknown about it. We don’t want anything to go wrong in front of a crowd. We do stuff that we know we can control.

PK: What are you known for? Do you have a signature death-defying flying maneuver?

JW: Not really. We’re all pretty much doing the same thing with our airplanes. You would be hard-pressed to tell one maneuver from another, because you don’t see it every day. Everything that I do, if you’ve never seen it before, is going to be wild and crazy. I’m going to fly straight up, and I’m going to twist and turn and swap tail for nose and cartwheel the airplane. Those things, no matter what I call them, they’re all going to be unique because you’ve never seen them before. We all are doing the same maneuvers. The airplanes that we fly are designed to do certain things, and we’re all pretty much doing those things. But each airplane makes it look a little different. Airplanes normally fly straight and level. The nose stays out in front, and the tail stays in the back. My airplane is designed to do just the opposite, if I choose to.

PK: How did you get into aerobatic flying?

JW: Quite by accident, actually. I was a student pilot flying just a Cessna. Straight and level. Go up a little bit and come back down. I was invited to go for a ride with a friend of mine who had a biplane. It was an aerobatic biplane and he invited me to go for a ride. He had two seats and I jumped at the chance. We took off and started doing loops and rolls and all kinds of stuff and I was instantly hooked. The reason why is because I was so bored between takeoff and landing. When you’re not on fire, and the engine’s running fine, there is nothing to do between takeoff and landing, right? You sit there and you monitor and you wait for the landing. There’s just nothing to do, so I was pretty bored. When I went out in this aerobatic ride, we’d go find a spot over an uncongested area and start doing loops and rolls. And I thought, ‘Oh, my, God; there is something to do. This is so cool.’

PK: I’ve heard that, especially with all of the automation on commercial flights, that it can be boring to just monitor the systems.

JW: Well, it is. If you look at an airline captain, he’s going to crawl in the cockpit, and he’s going to be in charge, and he’s not going to touch very many things. Then for hours on end he’s going to sit there and monitor everything while his co-pilot monitors him. There’s not a lot of hands-on flying. You don’t touch anything when you’re flying a commercial jet until you’re ready to land the airplane. In my mind, and this is my personal opinion, that’s not flying. It is flying, but you’re not doing anything. I want to get a hold of the airplane. I want to move the airplane around the sky.

PK: Any close calls?

JW: In 30 years I’ve had one major crash I survived. I probably shouldn’t have. I’ve also landed off-field a few times.

PK: Off-field?

JW: It means I landed some place other than a runway. It could be in a pasture or a farmer’s field or in a mountain somewhere. Any farmer’s field is fair game as far as I’m concerned. The airplanes we fly are designed for what we do, so they’re built very, very strong. But you just never know when something’s going to fail. One of the reasons we wear parachutes is because if something does go wrong, we have the opportunity to bail out of the airplane. Save our life and let the airplane go. Buy a new airplane. The endgame is always to survive.

PK: I’m assuming you’ve had to parachute out a few times.

JW: No, I’ve not had to parachute out. The few times that I’ve had problems, I was never high enough. If I’m high—10,000, 12,000, 13,000 feet—I’ve got lots of time to bail out of the airplane if something goes wrong. But when you’re down low, you have fewer options when things get ugly.

PK: How do you prepare for something going wrong?

JW: We plan for it. When I’m out practicing, I go up 3,000 or 4,000 feet, which is fairly high when you consider we fly our air shows at 50 feet off the ground. I’ll go up and I’ll start my routine and somewhere in the middle of it, I’ll pull the throttle back to idle as if my engine just quit. And the I’ll count the number of seconds that it takes me to get the airplane face side up to try to make a landing somewhere. That way I know what the airplane’s going to do if the engine quits if I’m in the middle of a tumble or a hammerhead dive or something. I know what the airplane will do because I’ve practiced.

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JACQUIE WARDA Vital Stats

Age: 62

Birthplace: Santa Monica

Astrological Sign: Virgo

Book on nightstand: Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight by William Langewiesche

Motto: “Be fit. Be strong. Fly like a girl!”

Website: www.JacquieBAirshows.com

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