An upside-down landing is one of the showiest maneuvers a stunting pilot
can perform. He doesn't really land upside down. He comes all the way in
in his glide upside down until he is about ten or twenty feet off the
ground. Then he rolls over and lands right side up.
Jack, who had got pretty hot at this maneuver, hit a telephone pole
coming in like that one day and woke up in the hospital.
Some time before that I had almost done practically the same thing. I
had dived low over the field down wind at the end of a show I had been
putting on at a little air meet and had pulled up until I was on my back
at about eight hundred feet. I decided I would not only glide in upside
down but would make it really fancy and slip both ways in the glide. I
started to slip but forgot and did it the same as I would have had I
been right side up and produced a bank instead. No, no, I told myself,
coordinate, don't cross controls. There. I tried one to the other side.
That's fine, I told myself. I got so absorbed in this little maneuver
that I completely forgot the ground until I was almost too low and too
slow to turn right side up again. I actually missed the ground by inches
as I rolled over, and only some kind fate presiding over absent-minded
stunt pilots enabled me to do it then.