Check out this dizzying air show footage of a Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor doing maneuvers that have got to be putting the pilot’s balls in a box.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUdt6ZSWUsI]

This video, from the same air show, is even longer. Wow.

My dad was a radio technician in the Air Force, and he was lucky enough to share a hangar with an SR-71 Blackbird. (It’s still the scariest looking, most beautiful airplane ever built.) Listening to his stories is what started my lifelong fascination with Lockheed birds, and my parents and I used to go to the Air Force museum in Dayton almost every summer. (In fact, we went again just a couple of years ago. They had one of the YF-22 prototypes of the F-22 there, and it was the unanimous family favorite. Dad and I also flew the simulator. We couldn’t shoot anything down, so we just started rolling it over and over again until our time was up. We could barely walk when we got out.)

The F-22 is everything rolled into one: speed, agility and advanced stealth technology. It does things that civilians like me will never know about, and that drives me friggin’ crazy.

That’s my idea of Heaven. I’m on the beach, with a big giant book that’s got the answers to everything. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, what the F-22 can do. Why the things I like to eat make my cholesterol go up, while the things that taste like cardboard make it go down. Stuff like that.

P.S. I was going to show this to my friend James, but I already know what he’d say. “Not enough Lima Lima Lima!”