Wife and husband pair up for daredevil act above Barrie

Barrie's annual airshow over Kempenfelt Bay is always spectacular, and while the Snowbirds will not be performing in the area this year, there are many others set to leave the crowd below in a state of shock and awe.

Most notably, the wing walking team of Sam Tryggvason and her husband, Mike, are taking to the skies over Barrie for the first time.

Wing walking doesn't seem to be a career a kid aspires to at a young age, and for Sam, the whole process started in 2014.

"I wanted to get my pilot's license," she explained. "My standard 9 to 25 job was not going to pay for my flight training, and I had to go seek a second job. An opportunity to be a wing walker came up and I thought, gosh, that sounds like a really cool adventure."

Tryggvason hails from rural Illinois in the United States, and upon doing wing walking for a season, it wasn't sustainable through winter due to the flying conditions, but did enough to get where she wanted to go.

"By the time the weather was better in springtime, I was ready to go and I paid for all of my flight training, knocked it out in a month."

But in the meantime, she realized she loved wing walking.

"it was a paying job and it got me up in the air," she explained. "I didn't know how physically exerting it would be, but I was up to it. It was physically fit and it seemed like a neat challenge and it was a whole lot of fun. There's nothing else like it. It's like pure grace up there."

"I keep flying just for fun. Anything that gets me up in the skies is a blast."

Wing walking began in aerial barnstorming shows in the 1920s. In fact, Charles Lindbergh began his aviation career as a wingwalker.

Tryggvason and her husband, Mike, are a team in this practice. This is their first time performing in Barrie, and Sam is very excited for this show, likening it to one of her favourite performances of her career in Virginia Beach, VA.

"I love the shows near water. The scenery is just stunning, especially from the top of the plane." she explains. "That was probably one of my favourite places and I think it was because the community is great—just like it is here."

The performers didn't anticipate the wildfire smoke that's drifted into the area would be a hazard for this year's Barrie Airshow. As of Sunday morning, Barrie's air quality was observed as a moderate risk (level 4) on Environment Canada's health index, better than it was from Thursday to Saturday.

"We could sort of smell [the smoke] on the ferry flight over the other day," Sam said, "but it seems to have been cleared up for us nicely and we're expecting great weather, and hopefully we're getting a lot more sun too."

During the performers' media availability Friday, Tryggvason was seen assuring members of the media that they were staying hydrated and accounting for the sun and high temperatures.

"The biggest risk for us and probably for a lot of the folks there in the stands watching us is heat management."

Risk management is what Sam and Mike focus on the most in their process. Not only as airshow performers but in their day jobs as well.

"In the military, I worked as an air traffic controller," Sam explained. "And on the civilian side, I work in the commercial space industry, making maneuvre recommendations for a set of satellites to prevent possible collisions. A lot of risk mitigation there.

Wing walking is a pretty interesting problem to solve.

Mike's background is in mechanical engineering as Sam explains. For them, their performances are a way to implement their shared appreciation of science and math in real life.

A lot of kids in the classroom will say 'when am I ever going to use this in real life?'

"We have spent hours at our dining room table, pen and paper, writing out the equations. A lot of what we deal with here is F=MA (Newton's Second Law of Motion)," she says. What distance of a fall is going to be damaging to me, damaging to the airplane, what sort of a tether should I use... all of those components are things to consider, even when doing the aerobatic sequence."

The performance starts with Mike bringing the plane to the calculated altitude and up to speeds around 240 kilometres per hour. Then, Sam will climb out and up onto the top of the biplane's wings.

Tryggvason's favourite maneuvre in their routine is the 'hammerhead,' which involves the plane going up into a climb, stalling at the top and diving toward the ground before Mike pulls the nose up safely.

Despite the daredevil nature of the act, some may find it surprising that Sam hasn't had a close call in her career.

"I've been pretty fortunate," she says. "We've been very careful, very deliberate, to take every, risk into consideration. It's been pretty pleasant and equally as entertaining for us."

From ground level, it's very hard to tell how wing walkers are tethered during their routines, but Sam assures, her risk management-oriented mind is taking everything into account.

"I do wear a safety harness and it's a retractable harness," she describes. "It's actually what most of the construction workers would use to keep them safe on the job. I use a compact version of that and that is attached to me throughout the entire flight. So I don't unhook and re-hook at any point. I'm always attached to the airplane."

Even more important, arguably, is the communication between Sam and Mike. Sam doesn't wear a headset, so non-verbal cues are crucial.

"We have hand gestures, and head nods," she says. "We have our own sort of sign language almost to communicate back and forth, whether I'm in the cockpit in front of him or on the wing above him."

Consistency is key for Sam and Mike, who, with all the numbers in mind to mitigate their risks, don't plan to stray away from their regular practice in hopes of putting on a great show for the crowd in downtown Barrie.