22 minute read
Dario Costa
Breaking through: Italian pilot Dario Costa makes his world-record flight through the Çatalca Tunnels in Turkey
What flies beneath
Less than 45 seconds. That’s how long it took pilot DARIO COSTA to pull off one of the most ambitious feats in aeronautical history – the world’s longest underground flight. But it’s a course he’s been charting since birth. This is what it takes to spend your whole life preparing to put it all on the line for 45 seconds…
It’s 4.30am on a chilly September morning in Istanbul. Dario Costa steps out of a caravan deep in the Çatalca Tunnels to the west of Turkey’s largest city. Usually bustling with traffic as part of the vast Northern Marmara Highway that links Europe to Asia, these twin bores carved through the hills are eerily empty right now. The roads are cordoned off, and vehicles have been redirected for 2km in all directions, in preparation for what’s to come.
Costa begins a slow bicycle ride along the half-kilometre length of the first passage, silently studying his surroundings. He slips into the moonlit stretch between the two tunnels, then enters the second 1.7km passage, noting for the final time the distance between the walls and the positions of ceiling fans, electricity stations and signage stanchions, before turning back to attempt something that until now has only existed in the comicbook imaginings of film directors and special-effects wizards. He will fly a plane through the hillside, just 75cm above the asphalt and with only enough space above him to stand an average-sized man.
“You see it all the time in action movies, but it’s always CGI,” says Costa with a wry smile. “Nobody has ever done it for real. I just wanted to see whether it was possible.” Costa has these possibilities covered. The 41-year-old Italian is a world-class aerobatic and race pilot, the first from his home country to have competed in the Challenger Class of the former Red Bull Air Race World Championship, and one of just 12 pilots selected to fly in the top tier of that competition’s 2022 successor, World Championship Air Race. Add in some moonlighting as a movie stunt-car driver – his most recent gig was filming with Tom Cruise on Mission: Impossible 7, out next year – and Costa is uniquely placed to turn a far-fetched action-movie trope into reality, and achieve a series of world records that include being the first to fly a plane through a tunnel, the longest flight under a solid obstacle, and two more pioneering accolades: “I’ll be taking off from inside the first tunnel, then flying through a second tunnel,” he explains. “Why take off inside a tunnel? It would have been a shame not to try it.”
The challenges mount as details of the flight are considered. The Zivko Edge 540 aerobatics plane he’ll be flying is a tailwheel aircraft. “I’m sitting with the nose up and the tail down on the ground. I can’t see forward. For the initial part of the flight I’m basically blind and have to be very precise, making sure not to go too far to the left or right or I’ll hit the walls.”
And the walls are close – mere metres either side of his wingtips. As Anthony
MARCIN KIN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL
Big ideas: Costa had been looking for a new challenge when Red Bull Turkey approached him about the tunnel pass
Hill, Costa’s flight technician for the tunnel pass explains, there’s no margin for error. “The tunnel is 6.72m high, and when Dario’s plane is at flight level the distance from the bottom of the landing gear to the top of the tail is around 2.25m, so the level he has to maintain is about 75cm above the road,” Hill explains. “The tunnel is 16m wide and the wingspan is 7.5m, so there’s about 4m either side of Dario’s wingtips and 3.25m above the plane. It’s all very close. And he’s going to do it at around 245km an hour.”
But Costa is used to tight spaces from his time in the Air Race. There, the 25m-high pylons the pilots were required to fly through were between 10-15m apart. Crucially, though, those inflatable pylons were designed to tear and collapse if clipped by a plane wing; the hazards in the tunnels are far less forgiving. “There are huge ventilation fans, lights, and emergency exits,” says Costa. “What’s making me more nervous is the limitation in height, because there’s no evasive exit for me – I can’t pull out if I have a problem. And I might hit the ground with the tyres and experience a ballooning effect, pushing me towards the roof. There are a lot of things to consider.”
He won’t have long to consider them: just 45 seconds. That’s how long it will take Costa from take-off until exiting the second tunnel, almost 2.4km away. Forty-five seconds of his life hanging in the balance. But this flight began long before that clock starts ticking – it stretches all the way back to his earliest memories of flying.
In 1979, amid the chaos of the Iranian revolution, Costa’s Persian mother and Italian father fled the country to Manchester, England, where Dario was born. Soon after, the family moved to Libya, where Costa’s father worked as an engineer and the one-year-old was first introduced to aviation. By the time the family settled in the Italian city of Bologna, the peripatetic lifestyle had sparked Costa’s fascination with flight.
“Flying was freedom,” he says. “Whenever I was in the air, everything on the ground was switched off – it was as if everything was possible.” The bedtime stories his grandmother read to him also fuelled Costa’s desire. “One was Aladdin. The story of this guy and the flying carpet pushed me all the way.”
But heady, rarefied hopes of a career in aviation were brought crashing to earth by the reality of a working-class existence in northern Italy. “I was told I was not born into the right family or with the right financial situation. It was always, ‘You can’t do that, find another path, it’s impossible for someone like you.’ It just pushed me even more to prove them wrong.”
Costa secured himself a place at the Istituto di Istruzione Superiore Baracca, a high school specialising in aviation technology, close to Bologna. There, his enthusiasm earned him the nickname ‘Aladino’, and he conducted his first solo flight at the age of 16. But, lacking the money to pay the huge expense of training for a commercial licence, Costa’s days in the sky seemed numbered. He refused to accept defeat. “I sold fish, cleaned swimming pools, worked as a gardener… Because of my family’s situation, I was able to go to university for free and learn physics. Then I got a job at my old high school. They needed someone to teach basic aerodynamics. I found that I loved it.”
But even that wasn’t enough to finance the hours of flight time needed. When the money inevitably ran out, Costa was forced to stop. But fortune smiled again. “The club where I was training needed a teacher – they asked if I would do it in exchange for flying hours. I cleaned the planes, fuelled them, did whatever I could. There was a scholarship, and I finished first, so they paid for half of my licence.” In 2003 Costa completed the course, but no sooner had he realised his career in commercial aviation than a greater destiny revealed itself.
“A friend showed me a video of the Red Bull Air Race. I was like, ‘OK, don’t bother yourself with airline jobs; that’s not what you’ve wanted to do since you were a kid. This is what you want to do.’ After that, everything I did was to get there.”
Costa obtained his instructor’s licence, then pursued an aerobatics rating, once again bartering his way to qualification, sleeping in the hangar, teaching Aviation English and continuing to rack up vital hours in the cockpit.
Top gun: a snapshot from the Italian’s early years working as a stunt pilot
LITTLE ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE
The dimensions of Costa’s flight path
Gap from either side of plane to wall: 4m Four road lanes wide, 1m-wide sidewalk on each side
To ceiling fans: 6.72m
Tunnel width: 16m Plane height: 2.25m
Top: Costa inside the tunnel. Thankfully, he had a bit more clearance than this when making the tunnel pass. But when you’re travelling at around 245kph, 4m either side of the plane and 3.25m above leaves no margin for error. Above: the Italian pilot consults with Garcia de Albeniz Mikel Lucas, head of engineers for the tunnel project at Bionic Surface Technologies. Left: Costa in training. Improving his reaction times was key to the successful completion of his flight
After moving to Milan, where he took on the role of chief instructor at Aero Club Milano, Costa finally found an opportunity to hone his skills to the competitive level required. “They had 40 aeroplanes and were flying thousands of hours per year, and they had a more performant plane for students, so I could improve myself using that machine.” After securing the Italian national championship in 2013, the call finally came… just not the one he was expecting. “Red Bull Air Race offered me a job as flight operations manager and development pilot,” he recalls, agonisingly.
Four years passed, with Costa watching the Air Race from the wings. But his patience paid off – in 2018 he was at last called up to the series’ Challenger Class, the competition in which future Masterclass World Championship pilots proved their worth. In his second race, Costa finished on the podium. The following year, he claimed his first win in Hungary – the first Italian to do so. “It took me 15 years, but I did it,” he says of finally achieving his ambition. But in that same year a new blow came – the championship was cancelled for good. “It was a massive shock,” he says, bluntly.
Costa continued to work as a display pilot and began talks with the promoter behind the next iteration of the Air Race, but bubbling back to the surface came the old dream – to take on a new challenge that would bring the intricacies of aviation to a wider audience. “All the projects I’d been thinking of had science involved, but that can be hard to understand from the outside; I was looking for something relatable. By chance, a guy at Red Bull Turkey messaged me asking if I would consider flying through a tunnel. I just responded to him, ‘Find me one and I will fly through it.’ He came back with the Çatalca Tunnels, which were under construction at that time. It was perfect. ”
In Istanbul, Costa says he feels ready. The risk is palpable, but he insists that awareness of the dangers and knowing how to handle them are the keys to success. “I’m scared of flying, every day – that’s what keeps me alive,” he says emphatically. “But I respect the fear. I take it, analyse it, try to mitigate it. I do the homework. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with this project. Of course I’m scared, but I’m less scared of things I know more about. What’s important is that you have no big question marks. ”
The process of removing those imponderables began in January this year, when Costa began an intense training programme at the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center in Thalgau, Austria. Helping to guide the pilot towards the levels of mental fitness required was York-Peter Klöppel, the centre’s head of mental performance.
“It’s extremely challenging, physically and mentally,” says the German sports psychologist. “We’ve taken care of the physical aspect with one of our strength- conditioning coaches and a physio. Over the last seven or eight months it’s been really beneficial. [Costa] has reported to us that when he’s been flying recently he’s able to pull more Gs, and that it doesn’t affect him so much. He’s made big improvements.
“On the mental side we’ve been focusing on improving his reaction time. The system we’re using is called Sensory Station, developed by a company called Senaptec. What we’re able to do is set
43.44 seconds
The tunnel walls are just metres from his wingtips
Five aerial world records:
Guinness World Record for longest tunnel flown through with an aeroplane: 1,730m First aeroplane flight through a tunnel Longest flight under a solid obstacle: 1,730m First aeroplane flight through two tunnels First aeroplane take-off from a tunnel
Last 150m of the tunnel is wider
Take-off at 6:43am local time (TRT) on Saturday, September 4, 2021
26.37 seconds
31.93 seconds Take-off
290m
1, 730m 11. 51 seconds
343m 5. 56 seconds Total distance: 2, 363m Total flight time: 43. 44 seconds Average speed: 245. 07kph TUNNEL VISION How to film an action movie in 45 seconds
BLACK SEA
Tunnel
Çatalca ISTANBUL
The Bosphorus
SEA OF MARMARA TURKEY
S ¸ ile
Costa’s subterranean flight set five world records in just three-quarters of a minute, but for the film crews tasked with capturing this moment in history, more world-firsts were required. Alongside cameras mounted on the tunnel floors, ceiling, entrances and exits, a racing drone chased Costa’s plane along the whole route and a cable cam tracked it from take-off – both aerobatic filming feats never attempted before. A bullet-time rig was also set up at the second tunnel entrance to capture a ‘slice’ of frozen action similar to that seen in the Matrix movies, and a tailmounted cam gave a 360° view of the whole flight. Due to the tight confines of the cockpit, only one camera could be mounted in there, capturing Costa’s facial expressions, and his moment of tearful elation as he launched triumphantly out of the final tunnel.
Making the task harder, the Çatalca Tunnels are an operational part of the Northern Marmara Highway, fielding traffic 24 hours a day. Coordinating with the Turkish authorities, the team closed the highway at midnight before the flight, diverting vehicles for 2km ahead of the tunnel entrance, before working through the night rigging the cameras, then testing the set-up by racing a BMW M along the flight path. Adding to the challenge, no person was allowed to remain in the tunnels – except, of course, Costa. Every camera had to be activated ahead of time, then the crews hurriedly left via emergency exits. And that’s where the fun began…
Dario Costa on the minute that changed aviation history
At 6.44am local time, on Saturday, September 4, 2021, Dario Costa became the first pilot to fly a plane through not just one tunnel, but two, and the first to take off inside one. It took him precisely 43.44 seconds to traverse the Çatalca Tunnels. He also earned a Guinness World Record for the longest tunnel flown through with an aeroplane (measured by the attending official at 1.73km). Here’s how Costa remembers it. Or, as is the case, doesn’t.
IN THE FLOW “I have almost no memory of what I did. I was fully in a flow state – absolutely calm. Before, my heart was banging right out of my chest, but the moment I put the throttle in, my heart rate dropped. I was asking myself, ‘What if something is not as we calculated?’ But as I started to move, I was hypnotised. There was nothing else.”
FULL THROTTLE “I trained for a smooth take-off, but in the end I was very aggressive – I went almost full power immediately. I was just eager to get airborne before exiting the first tunnel, to get that record ticked. The first thing I asked the technician afterwards was, ’Did I get airborne before the exit?’ He said, ‘Definitely, no problem.’”
EYES WIDE SHUT “I blinked. That doesn’t sound very important, but it really is. When we did the simulation with the reaction machines, I didn’t blink at all. We trained for me to blink at the exit of Tunnel 1, again at the entrance to Tunnel 2 – where we thought I would experience the first bump – and then after the last, bigger bump at the shape change in the tunnel. It allowed me to avoid any change in attitude. In normal flying, if you climb 2m it’s not a problem, but here 10cm could have been catastrophic.”
CROSSWINDS “They said we could go at sunrise and the wind was 1.7 knots. Perfect. But in the minutes before I took off, the wind changed. They told me it was three knots, which is nothing, but I felt it. As soon as I came out of the first tunnel, I felt the plane wanting to move away, but I reacted to it – you can see that I move the wings to counteract that effect.”
SUCKING UP “Into the second tunnel, I got the lift increase we’d calculated. I had to react to that within 250 milliseconds, but I started to feel a sucking from the roof and the sides. We’d expected four bumps, but this was all the time, sucking me towards the roof, so I had to counteract it. In the moment where the tunnel shape changes from round to square, it just stopped. And then I was out.”
CRY FREEDOM “From landing to taxiing to where everyone was waiting for me, there was about 1.5km and two bridges to pass under. I had an emergency phone in the corner of the plane, so I stopped under the first bridge and FaceTimed my family. It was 5am for them, but they answered. I saw them and I just cried like a baby. Then they started to cry, and I just gave them the thumbs-up because I couldn’t speak. Those 43 seconds were the best of the whole 14 months. They were the only 43 seconds where I was 100-per-cent sure that it was a good idea.”
SAMO VIDIC/RED BULL CONTENT POOL
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Final soar: Costa’s Zivko Edge 540 plane exits the tunnels after 43.44 nail-biting seconds
Mission accomplished: Costa experiences an overwhelming release of emotion following his intense, high-risk flight
a point-of-view video of the tunnel flight as a background, then a variety of things he needs to react to pop up on the screen. It’s a big touchscreen, so he has to physically hit them with his hands.
“When we talk about improving reaction time, it’s two parts. The first is what we call neuroplasticity – the more we do something, the better we get at it; the connections in the brain become stronger. The other part is related to his optimal mental state. We worked on breathing, thought control, emotional regulation, making sure that he can get himself into an optimal state just before he’s starting the reaction training. That really makes a huge difference.”
Costa is convinced that the regime has massively improved his flying skills. “I’ve never done training like this. It’s not just how fast you react but how fast your brain elaborates the information it receives. The exercises are not just ‘lights on and touch the pad’. It’s lights on, which colour or which shape, and you touch it or you don’t touch it. When I started, my reaction time was 450 milliseconds. Now I can reach 210 milliseconds.”
Costa’s attention to detail also involved anticipating how his plane might behave in the tunnels. For this, he enlisted the help of modelling expert Dr Andreas Flanschger of aerodynamics R&D lab Bionic Surface Technologies. “We used computational fluid dynamics employed in Formula 1 to model the effect of airflow on cars,” says Flanschger. We built digital versions of the aircraft and tunnels to see what would happen. The first was air temperature. The density of air is affected by temperature, and if there’s a huge difference [in air density] when exiting the first tunnel and entering the second, [Costa] will feel it as a bump and it could be dangerous. We can only generate numbers, but they’re crucial because on the day they will define whether we have a go or a no-go.”
It’s not just the space between the tunnels that affects airflow and, by extension, stability. Just as a train hurtling through a tunnel pushes air ahead of it, so too does Costa’s plane – the displaced air causes small shockwaves to then return down the tunnel, potentially upsetting the balance of the plane. Flanschger’s simulations modelled where those upsets might occur.
“Dario will get four additional bumps inside the tunnel, but at specific times. They get weaker each time, with the first being the heaviest. Aerodynamically they’re not really critical, but if the pilot doesn’t know they’re coming they could prove pivotal. Through modelling we’re able to predict when they will arrive and how big they are. Now he’s prepared.”
At long last, though, the time for investigation and calculation comes to an end and the only thing remaining is execution. After 14 months of painstaking preparation comes just 45 seconds of groundbreaking precision.
“What am I expecting from those 45 seconds? Peace,” smiles Costa. “That’s the reward. It’s just the last 45 seconds of one year of work for so many people. I want to prove that the work everybody has done is worth it.”
It’s also just the latest 45 seconds in a career born four decades ago in a young mind filled with tales of Arabian Nights, and that will continue long after the plane escapes those Çatalca Tunnels. “Every morning, I ask myself if I should fly or not. The important thing for me is that I have to learn something. The day I land, look back at the plane and say, ‘It was a useless flight today,’ that is the moment I will stop. Because you have to respect something we’re not born for. We are not birds; our bodies weren’t made for flying. Whatever we do, we have to learn it. So the day when I stop learning is the day I will not fly again. Because my ego will have become bigger than my knowledge.
“But at some point, I will stop flying and I’ll look back and say, ‘What did I do for the people? Did I entertain them enough? Did I help them to push for their dreams, like I did?’”
First, though, he has the task at hand. “As soon as I start flying, nothing else bothers me. I want to see how it feels to fly inside a tunnel, but in those 45 seconds I don’t think I’ll have time to feel anything other than just quietness. Just like when I was a kid, everything switches off. And everything is possible.”
