"I'M the girl racer of the skies."
That's how champion aerobatic pilot Lauren Richardson describes her love of defying gravity.
Lauren is just 28 but is one of the UK's top aerobatic pilots.
It's a skill that requires the precision of a gymnast and the physical stamina of a racing driver.
And the ability to keep some sense of location, within a tiny plane that's tumbling upside down and the green fields of the earth are hurtling around your head.
This is spatial awareness in the extreme, and wipes out any notion that 'women can't park'.
For Lauren, who lives in Selsley, leaving the earth has meant chasing her dreams with a dogged determination since childhood.
"I've always wanted to fly, since I Was about ten. But I came from a very modest family. I couldn't afford it, and couldn't afford to go to university either," she said.
Lauren grew up in a council house in Buckinghamshire, where her dad worked as a warehouse manager.
Even as a little girl she describes being more interested in making things than playing with dolls.
She left school at 16 to do an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering, her talent was recognised and by 19 was leading a team working with radio transmission systems.
But flying was her first love and while other teenagers might be socialising she scrimped and saved to a to learn to fly.
By the time she was 20 she had secured her pilot's licence, learning to fly at her local RAF flying club. It costs at least £8,000 to clock up the 50 or so flying hours required to secure a licence.
But, says Lauren, there is no great mystery to learning to fly a plane.
"It's not anything more difficult than driving a car. If you can learn to drive you can learn to fly," she said.
It's the fact that there's more to go wrong that plays on people's minds, I suggest.
"That's true, if something breaks in a car, you pull over. If something breaks in a plane, then you have some work to do," said Lauren with a little wry understatement.
Lauren learnt aerobatics because she says: "I got bored flying A to B in a Cessna and paying £150 an hour for it."
But she admits that she once thought people who did aerobatcs were 'mad'.
But it took was one upside down flight to change her mind.
"It was the biggest perspective changer," she said, and in so many ways that has turned out to be true.
"To look upwards at the green earth above your head is the most incredible feeling. I had no idea anything could be so life changing. I started having more lessons in a two seater plane."
When a little while, later Lauren entered her first aerobatics competition, which involve flying complex sequences of manoeuvres as accurately as possible, she won.
"I obviously had an aptitude for it," she said.
Hiring a two-seater to practice her manoeuvres was prohibitively expensive, so Lauren took the next logical step.
She bought a plane a single seater Pitts Special biplane, specially designed for aerobatics.
It can perform blisteringly fast, flick rolls and practically any conceivable manoeuvre in the sky.
"I guess I could have bought a house, but no, I bought a plane," she said.
"I've given up a social life, everything in fact, in order to be able to afford it."
In 2012 she became the British Female Aerobatic champion.
She's a rarity as a woman working in both engineering and aerobatics.
But, she explained, women have a better aptitude for aerobatics than men.
"Women can tolerate the G forces better than men, they're smaller the blood doesn't move around as much," said Lauren.
She says that she feels very 'comfortable' in the air, but an aerobatic display is surprisingly physically gruelling.
"The G forces that you go through in a typical display range from 7C to -5C. That means the pressure on your chest is seven times normal gravity, then suddenly it's the opposite," she said.
"You can knock yourself out going through that.
"Physically, aerobatics is absolutely brutal."
She describes a 15-minute flight as far more exhausting than two hours in the gym.
Psychologically it's also tough. She has to retain absolute focus for the eight or nine minutes of a display, hurtling through the air, always retaining a sense of location and keeping her eye on the horizon.
"It's all about knowing where to look. Racing drivers go through a similar process," she said.
Lauren has worked hard to encourage more girls to take up engineering or flying and thinks there are a variety of reasons why there are so few of them.
"It's partly that they don't seem to want to do these things.
"But it's also that a lot of women think they won't be able to do it, or that they are intimidated by a very male environment."
While Lauren has become used to being a lone woman in a largely male world, she says the men she as worked with have been overwhelmingly positive.
Flying is her life in so many ways.
Along with her partner, and fellow pilot, Rupert Wasey, she runs Hercules Propellers in Brimscombe which designs and makes vintage propellers.
Then weekends, especially in the summer, are spent looping the loop, flipping over, drawing hearts in smoke in the sky, or freefalling at shows, events and weddings across the country.
She's performed before crowds of 300,000 or drawn smoke hearts in the sky for a wedding party of twenty guests.
Her business, Lauren Richardson Aerobatics, is new and growing, and she's looking for support and sponsorship from any business that would also like to aim high.
"I'm very confident that in the long run it's the right thing to do. I've got some talent and, when you feel that, you've got to pursue what you're good at," she said.
So far she's never had an accident, but she does always wear a parachute. She's never done a parachute jump, but says the prospect doesn't frighten her.
"Parachuting would be fine. Bungie jumping, now that's something I wouldn't do," she laughs.
