Flying man.
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They call him Airman, Jetman, Rocketman and Fusionman, but to his friends, he is simply Yves: Swiss aviation pioneer Yves Rossy was propelled to instant stardom when, in 2006, he became the first and the only person to ever have achieved sustained human flight using a jet-propelled wing.
53-year-old Rossy wasn't always an aviation enthusiast. When he climbed into a Piper Aircraft at the age of ten, he was just an ordinary boy leading an ordinary life. When he disembarked he was a coy who had just had an extraordinary experience. After that things were never quite the same.
Three years later, an air show sealed Rossy's fate. During flight demonstrations by Patrouille Suisse, the planes swooped perilously close to the crowd, but the teenager was smiling. "They were here one second--so close, so fast, so noisy--and gone the next, disappearing behind the summit of a nearby mountain," he remembers. "It was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen, and all wanted was to be one of those guys flying one of those machines." And so the 13-year-old became a boy with a dream.
Chasing dreams
If he wanted to be a military pilot. Rossy had his work cut out for him. By his own admission he was never the academic type. After bagging a technical Matura (school-leaving exam) and an apprenticeship as a mechanic, he was ready to chance his luck at the age of 20. "The selection into the military academy was very hard," he recalls. "When we started, there were 3,000 of us--in the end, only 30 were left." Rossy was one of the "lucky ones" who managed to persevere. He was assigned first to the Hunter Hawker, and later to the Mirage III. "The Mirage was the best plane of all. It was the last aircraft that had primarily been made for the pilot, and not the weapon. Its manoeuvrability and aerodynamics were outstanding. You could pilot it with just your fingertips," he reminisces. "The cockpit was so narrow that the machine felt like an extension of me. When you forget that the plane is even there, that's when the fun starts." The military taught Rossy to control the machines using just his feeling and microscopic movement in his body. The key was "to be able to instinctively react to a situation as it is evolving."
While the air force was a great playground for the aviation enthusiast, he quickly realised there was more to it than just flying, "In Switzerland, the air force is purely defensive and exists to protect the country in conflict...
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