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I’ve always wondered why dogs like to stick their heads out of car windows.

After flying with the GEICO Skytypers, I get it: Your face might look a little silly while you’re doing it, but it’s so uniquely exhilarating that it’s hard to care.

On Thursday, I went to Reading Regional Airport for the opportunity to sit in the back of a plane flown by Ken Johansen, the Skytypers’ executive officer and wing pilot. I felt relatively calm getting into the World War II aircraft. After all, I’ve been in planes before, and things like roller coasters don’t really bother me. But wearing a flight suit and helmet and being strapped into a small plane four different ways made things seem just a little more intense.

The Skytypers, who are performing in Reading today through Sunday at the 27th annual World War II Weekend hosted by the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum, are nothing if not intense – at least in the air. Every detail of each turn and formation was carefully communicated among the pilots, all of whom I could hear through the headset built into my helmet.

Wingtip to wingtip, the four pilots in the air maneuvered their World War II-era SNJs into a diamond and then an echelon (which is essentially a diagonal line) as matter-of-factly as someone parallel parking a Honda Civic.For them, the simple flight we took probably feels fairly basic. What they do during their air shows is a little more advanced, as they fly in complex formations to spell out messages in the sky.

But, in the back of the plane, I was a little less put together. Thursday afternoon was windy, and flying thousands of feet in the air at 150 miles per hour made that very clear. Every part of my face felt like it was about to be blown off. I could feel my cheeks and mouth being flung around by the wind.

The thing that struck me the most about flying in a plane without a complete enclosure was that I could feel my eyelashes moving, which is an incredibly strange sensation probably not unlike what a dog feels when the wind blows through the hair on its face.

Seeing Reading from above was, in a word, breathtaking. Every other plane I’ve ever been on allowed only a small window to see through, and I didn’t realize until flying with the Skytypers how limiting that window is.In the back of the SNJ, there was no glass to obstruct detail, and I was much closer to the ground than I would be in a commercial airplane, allowing me to see every building downtown, every car in each parking lot and every tree on the mountains around the city.

Getting out of the plane, I felt like a golden retriever hopping out of the car after a road trip, and not just because the plane, built in 1940, doesn’t really have a graceful way to exit. I was windblown and very excited that no bugs had flown into my mouth.

But more than anything, I was still fired up from the mix of excitement and nerves that hit me as soon as the plane lifted off the ground. And that rush, not the prestige of being in an elite group of pilots, must be why Johansen and the other Skytypers are able to stay so passionate about flying show after show.