National Geographic: John McAfee’s Flying Circus Wants You!

John McAfee stands in the New Mexican playa in front of his trike ultralight, during a Sky Gypsies aerotrekking camping expedition. (Tom Clynes) John McAfee stands in the New Mexican playa in front of his trike ultralight, during a Sky Gypsies aerotrekking camping expedition. Click photo above for slide show.

Big ideas come easy to John McAfee. First he pioneered antivirus software, then instant messaging. Now the mercurial magnate thinks he’s on to something truly extraordinary: personal Icarus machines.

“And now, I’m going to count from one to five,” John McAfee says, his baritone dharma-salesman voice resonating through the small theater filled with meditating pilots. “And when I get to five, go ahead and open your eyes. Ready?”

One…

I’ve always considered myself an überskeptic, immune to the whole range of hypnotic experience. But I’ll be damned if John McAfee doesn’t have me believing one morning in early January that I can fly like a bird.

The day after my arrival at McAfee’s Sky Gypsies compound in the sparse and spectacular border country of southwestern New Mexico, I’m on the back of an open-cockpit, winged tricycle, swooping through the air above the Peloncillo Mountains. Up front, in the birdbrain position, McAfee pulls the control bar toward his right hip and sends us diving into Skeleton Canyon.

“This is what Icarus dreamed of,” McAfee yells, as we pirouette around a granite spire, then level off five feet above the floor of the Animas Valley, skimming over ocotillos and longhorn cattle at 65 miles an hour. McAfee stomps the throttle and aims for the crown of a small butte, then flicks the bar forward to spirit us over the top.

As we turn eastward in a broad, climbing arc, I glance over my shoulder and catch a glimpse of nine other airborne craft. They fly behind us in fast-and-loose formation, silhouetted against a backdrop of looming mountains. McAfee leads the squadron across a parched plain toward a sprawling, dry lakebed, and eases us down until the rear tires make tentative contact with the playa. Then, confident that the surface is solid, he cuts the throttle and plants the trike firmly on the ground. One by one, the others drop out of the sky and come to rest in a semicircle.

McAfee takes off his helmet and reaches into his saddlebag for a self-heating can of coffee as three women in red-and-black jumpsuits hop from their machines and run toward each other with hugs and hoots. The hugs become tackles, and the tackles devolve into a giddy wrestling match in the dust.

Opening the coffee, McAfee slices his finger deeply on the pull tab. Someone runs for a bandage as McAfee holds the wound together with his uninjured hand, squinting as he takes in a panorama of Mad Max flying machines, dust-kicking wrestlers, and jagged mountains pinned under a cerulean sky. As the dripping blood turns the dust at McAfee’s feet into dark mud, he glances at his watch and a broad smile creeps across his face. It’s high noon in the middle of nowhere, and John McAfee’s flying circus has arrived.

It’s hard to imagine another sexagenarian multimillionaire having as much fun as McAfee, the lead evangelist of the new adventure sport he has dubbed aerotrekking. According to McAfee, people can indeed fly like birds, and they don’t need full pilots’ licenses or constrictive, gas-guzzling tin cans to do it. What they do need are wide open spaces, a bit of training, and a new class of flying machines with kite wings, motor-driven rear propellers, and handlebars for steering. Variously called weight-shift ultralights, personal air vehicles (PAVs), or simply trikes, the machines have a range of 300 miles or about five hours in the air.

McAfee’s backcountry version of ultralight flying may or may not catch on, but if it does, it wouldn’t be the first time the world has found itself swept up in one of his improbable schemes…

Read the rest of the story at National Geographic