“Ignition!” shouts Nick Lawson from the cockpit as the twin engines of the small turboprop airliner we are in roar into life.

Within minutes of taking off from the runway, the elderly aircraft has reached 45,000ft (13km). Lawson and fellow pilot Joe Brown throw the plane into a 50-degree turn. As I’m pushed down and back into my seat by the g-forces, I don’t know whether to cry or be sick.

This is no ordinary flight. Around me sit several students, clutching sick bags and notepads at the ready. Lawson – known as the “the flying professor” – is unique amongst British academics. He not only carries out university research that could shape the future of aviation, he is also a qualified commercial airliner pilot.

When the plane levels off, his students put down their sick bags and pick up their pens, scribbling down data from the digital displays in front of them.

“What do you think of that?” asks Lawson over the headset. When he isn’t flying commercial aircraft, Lawson is the professor aerodynamics and airborne measurement at Cranfield University and head of the National Flying Laboratory Centre.

Cranfield University, which is 40 miles (64km) or so north of London, is as unique as Lawson himself – it is the only university in Europe that has its own airport and air fleet.

The College of Aeronautics, as the university was originally called, was founded in 1946 as a British rival to the California Institute of Technology (Caltec) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Four huge wartime hangars dominate its campus, a reminder that the university was built on the site of RAF Cranfield, a former World War Two night-fighter base. Lawson’s office is right next to the runway, suspended high up inside one of the old hangars, which also house the university’s five wind tunnels.