| Flying John McAfee |
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Page 3 of 6  McAfee has long been fascinated by ancient sources of wisdom. After he sold Tribal Voice, he devoted himself full-time to yoga. He built practice rooms at several of his homes around the country, became a yoga instructor, and in 2000 wrote and published four books of yoga-flavored wisdom. But that phase is over. When I mention to him that I’ve bought his yoga books, he gestures dismissively. “They’re all trash,” he says. “That’s what was going on in my mind at the time. It was a transition point for me, from the world of business to a more open world.”In fact, McAfee had become gripped by a new passion. In 2003 he was flying to Nepal with his girlfriend, Jennifer Irwin, when he opened the in-flight magazine to an article about a kind of lightweight airplane called a trike. Also known as a weight-shift ultralight, it’s essentially a hang glider with a 1200cc motor in back. About the same power and weight as a motorcycle, a trike provides a unique sense of speed (up to 95 miles per hour) and maneuverability—the same thrill as McAfee’s ATVs and Jet Skis, but in three dimensions. Irwin remembers the moment vividly. “He showed me the article and said, ‘What do you think of this?’ ” She knew that the question was rhetorical. “My heart sank,” she says. As soon as the couple was back from the Himalayas, McAfee started making inquiries, and before long he had located a flight school near Phoenix. While doing his flight training at Kemmeries Aviation in Peoria, Arizona, McAfee met an eccentric former guided-missile engineer named Neil Bungard. In the course of his own aerial adventures, Bungard had figured out how to navigate underneath Tucson’s heavily monitored airspace by flying low up the Santa Cruz River, beneath the radar of nearby Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Intrigued, McAfee tagged along one evening as Bungard showed him the route. But when McAfee balked at slipping underneath a set of low-slung power lines and instead flew over them, he triggered the radar and wound up being intercepted by Air Force Black Hawk helicopters. “We came around the corner and there they were, with guns pointing at us,” he remembers. McAfee managed to avoid being arrested, and a new obsession was born: shooting over the landscape at minimal altitude, sometimes so low that the yuccas whacked his undercarriage. Gunning through canyons became a particular favorite. The general rule of flying is that the higher you fly, the safer you are, but McAfee decided that low was the way to go. He even came up with a term for the practice: aerotrekking. He convinced a core group from the flight school to take up the new hobby, and together they formed an informal club, the Sky Gypsies. Several, including McAfee and Irwin, got tattoos of the new club’s symbol: stylized angel’s wings. |
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