WYN'S WEAPON

How’s this for the good old days of smoked-out powerbands? Epic!

- Alan Cathcart

It’s a long way from Okinawa, Japan’s most southerly island and the American military’s easternmost outpost, to Cape Canaveral and the NASA Space Shuttle’s blast-off base — half a lap of the globe, to be precise. But for US Air Force Major Wyn Belorusky Jr. and the quartet of limited-edition Yamaha RZV500R ring-ding road rockets he brought Stateside with him, it was a voyage of a renaissance when he exchanged sub-tropical Japan for the Florida Space Coast, after a three-year posting as a C130 navigator. ‘I’m a born-again biker courtesy of the US government,’ proclaimed the 48-year-old veteran, a peace dividend discard given his early retirement papers on a full pension by Uncle Sam in the wake of the Cold War’s conclusion, after a 17-year USAF career which ended with a posting to NASA writing Space Shuttle guidance system algorithms. ‘Instead of getting paid by the Pentagon to shoot rockets into space, Washington gives me the budget to play with the two-wheeled kind on the street. I’d say that was a pretty good peace dividend — wouldn’t you?’