A RUSH of air, an explosion of noise, and woosh, there goes Paul Hopkins.

For the BAE Systems' chief test pilot, there's no waiting in queues of traffic, he could pass over Preston faster than the speed of sound.

And there is the risk of flying an aircraft that hasn't been fully tested and hasn't even been made available to the Air Force yet.

The 5,000 hours in the cockpit has left Paul, a former squadron leader, now based at Warton, with nerves of steel.

He said: "To you it might seem nerve-wracking, but I've been doing it quite a while, so I've got used to it.

"But it can be very demanding and you can have a certain trepidation about some testing. It isn't so much the test flying of old American movies where they test the wind with their fingers and away they go!"

Paul, 51, from Lytham, joined the air force at 19. Now he is in charge of all testing for combat aircraft within BAE and is currently putting the new Eurofighter Typhoon through its paces.

During flights Paul flies at about 800mph when he is at low levels and twice the speed of sound higher up.

And even though most of the testing is done over the Irish Sea, when the weather is bad and Paul has to use his instruments to guide the plane in, he comes in to land directly over Preston.

He said: "It's not often we do that. We keep our noise and such over the Irish Sea, it keeps us away from the population."

Talking about the boom near Liverpool on Tuesday when his plane passed through the sound barrier, he said: "It's just a booming noise, it doesn't actually do any damage. People might hear but it's just like a lorry going past your window."

He said the incident which caused such a shockwave on the Wirral acutally happened out at sea, but the boom was so fierce, the tail end hit the coastline.

Paul added: "Airline pilots get more flight time than me but they're cruising around for long periods of time so they collect up a lot of hours. But for fighter pilots 5,000 hours is quite a lot of time."

But Paul, born in West London, won't be doing his beloved job forever, as test pilots retire at 55.