YOU name it, John Travolta has flown it. "I love how flying makes me feel, " he says. He's qualified to pilot every plane from a Lear or a Hawker to the Boeing 747. He was experienced enough to have been able to land his Gulfstream IIB safely at Washington Airport in 1993, despite complete electrical failure due to icing. He has flown with the astronaut John Glenn, and even has his own Boeing 707 - called Jett Clipper Ella after his two children - which he bought from Qantas Airways and flies from his own airstrip in Florida. When it developed engine problems during a refuelling stop at Shannon two weeks ago after the premi�re of Wild Hogs in Berlin, he hired a private jet to continue his journey back to the States.

"As a small child I used to listen to the planes flying in to land at La Guardia Airport near where I grew up and dream that my bed was flying, " he says. So when he saw the new A38 Airbus on display in Brisbane last year, he just couldn't resist taking it up for a spin.

The world's largest passenger aircraft, capable of carrying 555 people, it had so far only been flown by test pilots. His friend, Qantas chairman Margaret Jackson, obligingly got on the phone to Airbus Industries. "I want John to fly the plane, " she said. "No, no, no - it's not possible, " she was told.

"Well, we're buying 12 of them, " she pointed out. "Okay, why not, " they said.

So how was it? "Almost too easy, " he tells me. "So much work is done for you, it's unbelievable. If you forget something, it remembers it."

Travolta, who was 53 in February, comes back down to earth in the new Disney comedy Wild Hogs.

He's teamed up with Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H Macy as a bunch of suburbanite weekend biker dads who take to the road to get over their male menopause blues. Not that he minds having to make do with a Harley. "I didn't take much persuading, " he says. "I've ridden bikes since I was 18. When I first came out to Hollywood it was the only transport I could afford. I've often fantasised about motorcycles taking off into the air, you know, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."

After achieving overnight success in the 1970s as a disco stud with Saturday Night Fever, Grease and Urban Cowboy, his career slumped with several ill-chosen movies. He'd reached a stage where he could hardly afford a flight ticket let alone buy a 747. He was happy to pocket a lowly $140,000 fee when Quentin Tarantino offered him the role of Vincent Vega - the hit-man who likes Big Macs - in Pulp Fiction. It won him an Oscar nomination which he followed up by winning a Golden Globe for Get Shorty, putting him back on the Hollywood A-list where he now routinely commands $20 million a movie.

"I wouldn't know what a mid-life crisis is, " he says. "As an actor you don't need to run away to do things you've always dreamed of doing before it's too late. There's nothing to run to because we have the toys, we have the things we need, the escapes - all that."

He does admit to a slight sadness at the thought of his own mortality. "When I hit 50 it crossed my mind that there were only so many more summers that I might have, while I'm someone who believes you lived before and you're going to live after, but I like the life-time that I have now, and I want to make the most of it."

Since gyrating to the Bee Gees in a sleek three-piece-white polyester suit he's put on some weight, but he carries his age well.

"I haven't done this" - he makes a nip-tuck gesture to his mouth - "or this" - he makes another gesture to the pouches under his eyes - "so I look what I am, but mind you, the kids that recognise me from Grease never comment on any difference. So I must look enough like the way I used to for them to say, there's Danny Zuco." No doubt his distinctive cleft chin helps, too.

"Do you think so?" he says, fingering it.

The youngest of six children, he was encouraged to take to the stage by his Irish mother Helen Cecilia Bourke who sang with the Sunshine Sisters before becoming a high school drama teacher. "He danced in my womb, " she used to boast. She persuaded his father, an Italian-American tyre salesman, to build a little theatre in the basement of their three-storey New Jersey home. At seven, he accompanied his big sister Ellen when she toured in Gypsy. He quit school at 16 to join her in New York. By 22 he'd moved in with 40-year-old Diana Hyland, who played his mother in the TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. She had terminal cancer and died in his arms while he was filming Saturday Night Fever. Shortly afterwards his mother also died of breast cancer.

His marriage to Kelly Preston - who he met filming The Experts - and the birth of their children Jett in 1992 and Ella Bleu in 2000 seems to have provided an emotional stability missing since he left home.

"I've gone beyond all my childhood expectations, and I hope the same for my own children, " he says. "So I'm not strict with them.

I figure they'll go to bed when they're tired and they'll eat when they're hungry, so I don't tell them to do any of that. They're privileged children, but they're spoiled in a good way. As long as their values are in the right place and they understand manners and respecting other people, I don't care.

"I was very much part of what was happening at the moment when I was a kid. The Beatles came out. The Motown sound came out. There was the spacewalk on the moon. I was right on all those 1960s beats. And then I lived through the next generation that I helped create with Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and I watched kids follow that. And then there was the Pulp Fiction generation, and I was part of all that too.

So when I watch my son and daughter respond to all that's going on in this present generation, it looks like normal to me. I don't feel I have to be in touch with it. My parents didn't feel they had to like The Beatles. I think, well okay, that's what they're doing, that's par for the course. And that's how decades go. So nothing seems strange to me."

Even before Wild Hogs became America's biggest-grossing comedy, Disney began planning another movie with Travolta. "It's about a couple of dads who have to take care of two children, " he says.

"When I read the script I thought the little girl was just like my daughter Ella Bleu, always imagining things. So I suggested that they cast her. She wants to act, and this is perfect for her. I think she's ready. But she doesn't know yet. I want to make sure the contracts are really going to be right before I tell her. We've been given the okay. But there are a lot of negotiations. I don't want her to be disappointed. But I couldn't wish for a better life for her. I hope she'll be another Jane Fonda."

Meanwhile he's been strutting around in nylons and high heels with Michelle Pfeiffer in a new movie version of the Broadway musical Hairspray. He plays the perplexed mom Edna Turnblad, a role immortalised by drag queen Divine in the original 1988 John Waters cult comedy. "I play her light, as though she's 100 lbs, " he says. "I've a prosthetic, so you don't really recognise me. I even fooled some of the guys on the set.

They tried to chat me up. You just need a breast and an ass and suddenly you have all the power of the world."

Getting rigged up in bras and girdles left him gasping. "I don't know how women go through all that discomfort, particularly the high heels, " he says.

Casting issues have created problems over the much anticipated screen version of the 1970s TV show Dallas, in which he'll play the unscrupulous oil tycoon JR Ewing.

First Jennifer Lopez pulled out from playing his alcoholic wife Sue Ellen. Then Bend It Like Beckham's Gurinder Chadha replaced Robert Luketic as director. So is Dallas going ahead? "Well, I'm being paid for it, " he shrugs. "When it happens, it happens."

That's been how much the way he's got where he is now. "I believe in putting life first and just taking things as they come, " he says.

'Wild Hogs' opened nationwide on Friday