The Lowest-Flying Jet Engine

Charles Man Takes Luge to the Next Level

There is a popular image of the extreme sports guy: roughly 19 years old, baggy jeans and frequent use of the words "dude" and "stoked" while flipping up and down on big ramps.

Bob Swartz doesn't fit it.

He's 46. Married with two kids, he lives on a wooded cul-de-sac in Waldorf. He is an engineering technician for the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, where he helps build classified antenna and computer systems around the globe.

But his sport of choice is street luge. He lies on his back on an elongated skateboard two inches from the ground. Feet first, he flies down roads at more than 60 mph. He recently finished second at a race in Upstate New York. To stop, he uses his feet, generating so much smoke that he's had to glue strips of motorcycle tires to the bottom of the wrestling shoes he wears while racing.

Over the years, Swartz has swallowed whole the challenges of this small corner of extreme sports, where participants have no dedicated place to practice. Cars pull out of driveways. Residents sometimes call the police. Cats and squirrels become hazards. When Swartz zips down hills in Charles County subdivisions, his wife, Cathy, often sets up midway down to serve as a lookout. She holds up signal flags and talks with him by two-way radio.

Like other things he does, Swartz's plan to take the sport more mainstream begins to make sense only after he's had a long time to explain it. In this case, he recently bought a $5,000 jet engine -- one designed for unmanned military aircraft -- and attached it to the back of a luge. He gives exhibitions at major drag races, having thus far hit 77.76 mph. He aims to break the coveted 100 mph barrier, perhaps by advancing to a twin-engine design next year.

"What possessed you to do this?" Swartz was asked last weekend over a drag-strip public address system in Rockingham, N.C.

"To draw attention to gravity sports," he told the crowd, referring to how he races down hills without jet power. Then he shot down the track. As part of Rockingham's pre-Halloween nighttime races, Swartz donned a glow-in-the-dark skeleton suit over his thick, protective leather racing uniform. He also wears a motorcycle helmet.

Swartz grew up the son of a wallpaper hanger and a nurse in southern New Jersey. As a 7-year-old, he remembers, he fashioned a go-cart out of wood scraps and a set of small wheels his grandfather gave him. He rebuilt bikes and lawnmowers. His parents thought he'd be a scientist or a doctor.

He didn't like classrooms, though, and enrolled in electronics vocational school. Along the way, he rode dirt motorcycles. He and Cathy also went scuba diving. In 1994, Swartz was flipping through TV channels when footage of street luge riders in Seattle stopped his fingers. "Uh-oh," his wife said.

What followed were 10 years over which Swartz rode the crest of the sport and then wiped out along with it -- both professionally and personally.

Street luge can be breathtaking, especially when filmed by tiny onboard cameras. Riders steer by leaning left or right. They draft behind one another, like stock-car racers, which allows them to build up momentum to zip by the rider in the lead. In 2000, Diane Sawyer climbed aboard a street luge for a gentle spin through Manhattan's Riverside Park on "Good Morning America." Before she did, Swartz helped teach her.