Working the parabola trade
GeekDad interviews Tim Bailey, who works for the ZERO-G Corporation as a member of the Parabolic Flight Crew: Dream Jobs You’ve Never Heard Of: Parabolic Flight Crew – GeekDad/Wired.com – Dec.10.10.
> Tim’s job is the closest thing there is to being an astronaut without actually going into space. He spends his days assisting and training people in aircraft flights that simulate a microgravity environment—effectively he’s a flight attendant teaching people how to fly—and he is one of only nine people on the planet qualified to do this.
Tim has performed over 150 such flights, each with multiple parabolas—where the craft goes up and down at a steep angles to create a “weightless” free-fall environment inside—equating to over 24 hours of his life that Tim has spent unencumbered by the Earthly bonds of gravity. This has led to Tim’s unique ability to, as he puts it, “execute some fairly bad-ass flips in any axis [x, y, and z].”