{gallery}08_18_09/pilot{/gallery} Wings ‘N' Wheels pilot Kelly Pietrowicz straps her passenger, Brock Kestner, of Basin, into her Pitts S2B for a ride Saturday. It was Kestner's first time on a flight. Tribune photo by Kara Bacon Pilot lives for thrill of flying pitts biplaneAlmost like you're a bird out there.”That's what Kelly Pietrowicz, or Kelly P., of Oklahoma City, Okla., said about flying her speedy Pitts S2B biplane in air shows like Wings ‘N' Wheels.

Climbing like a rocket. Spinning, inverted, with nothing but a seemingly invisible, clear-plastic bubble for a wind screen and straps clutching shoulder blades are all that contain a whirling, cinematic view of earth and sky.

“The plane just becomes a part of you,” Pietrowicz said.

“How fast you think we're going?” comes Pietrowicz' detached voice over the on-board intercom.

“One-hundred fifty?” is her passenger's response while gawking at the horizon, mountains and plains merging in a pell-mell panorama.

“Two hundred,” is Pietrowicz's placid reply.

Like a hawk accessorized with jet engines, the plane accelerates with stomach-lurching velocity.

Pietrowicz aims the Pitts in a dive, perpendicular to the ground. The deck rushes at the windshield like a motion-picture camera on a turbo-charged zoom lens. In a rush, the ground rises up, faster and faster. Sage brush and blades of grass become distinct, then she pulls up. In a heartbeat, the plane is level.

She yanks the stick, it spins left, cutting corkscrew turns. Plummeting to deck like an eagle after a rabbit.

Riding in Pietrowicz's “Flying Babe,” being pushed in your seat by the force of gravity or leaving your stomach on a distant cloud after a dive might seem terrifying. But you feel secure with Pietrowicz at the controls.

Pietrowicz is a no-nonsense kind of gal. She knows what she wants and goes out and gets it with elbow grease and audacity.

“I don't call it dangerous,” she said in a voice that quashes further queries.

Training is the key, Pietrowicz said, and she attended aerobatics school off and on for two and one-half years.

Pietrowicz has been a pilot since 1996, flying her Cherokee 180. She began flying aerobatics in 2002.

Back in Pietrowicz's Cherokee days, she was a cop. Law enforcement was a childhood dream.

“That's what I wanted to be since I opened my eyes,” Pietrowicz said.

Pietrowicz gives a whole new meaning to the word “certitude.” It is easy to picture her in uniform, with badge and gun, watching bad guys run for cover.

But aerobatics changed all that. She quit the force in Midwest City, Okla., “ 'cause I fell in love with aerobatics.”

The Pitts is worth $270,000, and she sank every penny into her passion.

“I had my life's savings, investment money,” Pietrowicz said. “I never had to work again.”

She's a full-time aerobatics pilot now, but it's an expensive vocation.

Like a race-car driver with a hotrod plastered with a sponsor's stickers, Pietrowicz could use just that — a sponsor.

But Pietrowicz isn't flying for riches. It's about perfecting perfection.

The hot little plane is a brain-stimulus package with wings.

“If I'm challenging me, my mind is producing cells,” Pietrowicz said.

But there is something else driving Pietrowicz when wrestling the stick and pulling/pushing G's leaves her feeling as though she ran the Boston Marathon.

What motivates Pietrowicz is a kid grinning at her spectacular stunts or an elderly man recalling his days as a fighter pilot in World War II.