(MONEY Magazine) – My Beechcraft T-34A is doing 140 nautical miles an hour, banked so steeply I'm looking up at the Georgia countryside 6,000 feet below. Skittering away at four o'clock low is another T-34. In it is my younger brother Kurt, a 41-year-old software engineer whom I'm planning to send to a fiery death in the next few seconds. "Cut inside his turn," coaches Steve "Rothman" Kenny, 36, a former Navy F-14 pilot, from the back seat of my Beech. I pull back on the joystick, and our nose drops straight down at the brown hills, then rises to point at Kurt's plane as it tries a desperate evasive move. G forces tighten on my chest like a leaden vise, and my vision starts to go gray. Can't stop now, though. Kurt's plane is sliding into my crosshairs. Squeeze the trigger. The simulated rasp of a machine gun fills my headset and...yes! A plume of white smoke boils out of Kurt's engine. Splash one sibling.

This is no dream. That really is me (in the photo above), a guy who has never before steered anything hotter than a Ford Escort, flinging a 300-horsepower airplane around the sky, pulling Gs and generally amazing myself.

For about $700, it could be you too. Roughly half a dozen air-combat programs around the country offer deskbound daydreamers a chance to get in touch with the Eddie Rickenbacker within, flying real (surplus) propeller-driven military trainers in hour-long mock dogfights under the tutelage of real (retired) fighter pilots. (See the table on the next page for top air- combat schools.) Flight experience is not required; about 70% of the roughly 6,000 wannabes who pass through the schools each year are not pilots. Typically, age is no limit either, as long as your heart is in good shape. In this game, the right stuff consists simply of an active imagination and the capacity to be thrilled.

As Kurt and I pull up to "squadron headquarters" of Sky Warriors at Fulton County Airport, northwest of Atlanta, I can sense he is looking forward to some payback for five or 10 years' worth of harmless brotherly half nelsons. But first there's ground school. We sign releases, don our Tom Cruise flight suits and take our seats for an hour-and-a-half briefing on basic air-combat tactics. We learn the high yo-yo (a steep climb topped with a hairpin turn) and the defensive hard turn (meant to shake an adversary off your tail). To properly execute that maneuver, Rothman explains, we need to pull four Gs for the duration of the turn. In other words, we should turn so sharply that centrifugal force quadruples our weight. By comparison, at its most hair-raising point, the Montu roller coaster at Busch Gardens in Tampa briefly touches 3.85 Gs.

Four Gs doesn't sound comfortable. At that level your blood weighs four times as much as normal and your heart has to work that much harder to get oxygen to your brain. Unless you push the blood back up by constricting your stomach and legs, your field of vision will narrow, colors will go gray and eventually you will black out. As a guy who sometimes gets woozy standing up quickly after tying my shoes, I begin to question how right my stuff is.

Sky Warriors' gleaming T-34s are restored versions of the military's primary trainer of the 1950s and 1960s, armed with lasers and sensors; the sensors register a laser hit by switching on five seconds of that oh-so- satisfying air-show smoke. The planes are also equipped with three video cameras; at the end of the flight, instructors will assemble the footage into a souvenir video of our derring-do.

After takeoff, Rothman turns the controls over to me. To my amazement, the plane translates my ham-fisted joystick movements into precisely the maneuvers I intended--thanks, I'm sure, to Rothman's light touch on the controls in the back seat. I keep to tentative, gentle turns at first. But after Kurt pops me a few times, adrenaline takes over. Before long I don't care whether the horizon in my windshield is horizontal, vertical or upside down. My sole reference is the other plane--and my only goal is to get into the killing zone behind Kurt's tail.

By the time our hour of combat is over, my brother and I have murdered each other several times over. And we both have also repeatedly pulled four Gs, if you can believe our instructors. How'd I do? Fine: I was having way too much fun to be scared or sick.

If this sounds like your cup of high-octane tea, you'll want to find an air-combat school that will keep you safe and show you a good time--in that order. Obviously, you can get killed for real doing this stuff, although you'll actually be considerably safer than you would be puttering around in ordinary private planes. In an estimated 40,000 flying hours over seven years, air-combat simulation has led to just two accidents (one of them fatal)--that's an accident rate about half that of private aviation overall. To maintain that safety record, every air-combat school follows the same rules of engagement--for example, no dogfighting below 2,500 feet, which leaves plenty of room for instructor pilots to recover from a novice's mistakes. To improve your odds even more, fly with an outfit that has been around for at least three years and has carried customers on at least 1,000 dogfights. You might also ask to go up only with a pilot who trained on military fighters. All the schools in the table above can meet these requests.

Safety issues aside, there are marginal distinctions among the programs. The one that matters most in my mind is the kind of airplane the outfit flies. Most use either the Beechcraft T-34A or the sleek new Italian-made SIAI-Marchetti SF.260. The Marchetti is more agile, but in it you sit side by side with the instructor. I have to agree with Don "Phantom" Wylie, president of Texas Air Aces in Houston: "In a T-34, you sit up front, with the instructor in back of you. It's just you and your gunsight, John Wayne all the way." And if you aren't trying to be John Wayne--or at least Tom Cruise--you've completely missed the point.