LOUISBURG - At about 2,000 feet, pilot John Makinson lets go of the stick, takes his feet off the rudder, and hands the airplane over to a doofus who can barely fly a kite. Not just this doofus. Any thrill-seeking doofus with $225 and a cast-iron stomach.

For the next two weeks, History Flight, a traveling nonprofit concern, will let anyone climb the wing of a World War II-era plane, buckle him- or herself into the cockpit and turn a barrel roll over the Franklin County woods.

It happens so quickly.

One minute you're pulling the red-and-white lever that raises the landing gear, noticing that even a mobile home park looks majestic through the whirring propellers of a T-6 Texan.

The next minute, Makinson says, "OK, you've got the airplane," in the same voice you'd use to ask for more ketchup.

The stick rises out of the cockpit floor, metallic green and long as a walking cane.

Push it, and the Texan's red nose zooms toward the ground. The ground looms closer. Your face feels as if it is melting under the pressure. The engine gives that yowl you've heard in so many war movies, that Doppler-effect sound that always comes before the rat-a-tat of machine guns.

"Doing OK up there?" Makinson asks, unfazed.

Pull the stick back, and the nose rises so dramatically that the Earth disappears. The sun draws closer and glows brighter. Air rushes through the open canopy. The pressure pushes the seat through your back.

Then there are rolls. And loops. And the Immelman, the gut-wrenching climb-and-turn maneuver invented by the German World War I ace Max Immelman.

When Makinson turns them, you're free to watch the horizon turn vertical, to marvel when the ground turns into sky, and vice versa. You can float upside-down, hanging only from a canvas strap, the G-forces so strong they put some passengers to sleep.

But when Makinson invites you to roll the plane on your own, it's like being asked to perform your own surgery. The stick feels like a raw egg in your hand, and only the nerviest amateur can turn a 5,200-pound plane on its belly in midair.

Nobody ever frightens Makinson. "I just never let it get that far," he says. "They usually scare themselves."

Money from the flights goes mostly to pay for hunting for remains of U.S. servicemen missing overseas, men who would have learned combat flight inside the same kind of plane now launching out of Louisburg.

This year, the group funded a monthlong search in the Marshall, Caroline and Gilbert islands -- Pacific battlegrounds during World War II.

But Makinson, 45, a Canadian who spent more than a decade as a bush pilot in Alaska, clearly gets his own thrill from behind the 600-horsepower engine.

The T-6 Texan grew popular as a trainer for budding World War II pilots, one step above the Stearman biplane that also flies out of Louisburg this week.

Known to Navy pilots as the SNJ and pilots of the British empire as the Harvard, the Texan tops out at 240 mph. This particular Texan, made in 1954, spent most of its life training the South African Air Force. Many Third World countries, though, used the T-6 as a combat aircraft, typically to bomb and strafe guerrillas.

But for a novice inside the cockpit, the goal falls far short of gunning down enemy aircraft. Keeping lunch down is challenge enough.

With the air rushing in, you can imagine a teenage farm boy shipped half a world from home, given a buzz cut, a pair of goggles and a mission to kill. He would have graduated to a single-seat fighter before flying over Germany or the Pacific -- a P-51 Mustang, perhaps; maybe a Grumman Hellcat.

But if he made it home alive, he would have recalled his first flights in training, how it felt to pull the stick back at 2,000 feet, wind in his face, clouds racing past.