his ejection seat to make sure it was safetied, then sat down and began running his power-off and before-APU-start checklists.
Patrick stuffed his jacket in the “bunk” behind the copilot’s seat, his helmet bag of extra booklets and “plastic brains” in the space beside his seat, then pre-flighted his seat. He checked that the four seat safety pins were in place, the ejection handle lock was down, and the ejection mode switch was in MANUAL, meaning that if either pilot’s seat malfunctioned or was inadvertently activated, it wouldn’t automatically eject anyone else’s seat. Then he climbed in and started strapping in.
The last bomber he had any time in at all was the EB-52 Megafortress — and that was cavernous compared to the B-1 cockpit. Patrick was unaccustomed to wearing a big, bulky survival vest, and threading all the seat straps around it and finding the right clips and fasteners was harder than he expected. You didn’t just sit in a B-1 bomber — you wore it. He had to leave the shoulder straps as loose as he could and push his arm with his opposite hand to reach switches. Even adjusting the seat took a few moments to relearn.
“How’re you doing over there, sir?” Rinc asked, a trace of amusement on his lips. “Finding everything okay?”
Patrick felt a bit self-conscious as he finally got straightened around and settled in. He wrapped the Velcro strap of his checklist around his left thigh, a small metal kneeboard around his right thigh, and opened the checklist to the “Before APU Start” checklist page. He capped it off by slipping on a new pair of Nomex flight gloves, working the fingers down tight, then punching a fist into his palm excitedly, just as he used to do before starting engines years ago as a young crewpuppy. “I’m doing fine, Major,” Patrick replied. “Don’t be afraid to kick my butt if I’m not keeping up with you.”
“You’re doing fine so far,” Rinc said. “It took me three tries to find all my harness straps without help.”
The first order of business was starting the APU, or auxiliary power unit. The APU was a fifth small self- contained jet engine, mounted in the B-1’s tail, which provided electrical, hydraulic, and pneumatic power to the aircraft without starting one of the big turbofans or relying on external power carts. With the APU, the Bone was completely self-sufficient — it did not need ground power equipment for any flight-line operations. Once the B-1’s APU was started and supplying electrical power, the crew started to turn on their equipment and run power-on and before-engine-start checklists. At precisely the briefed time, the crew began the engine-start and after-engine-start checklists. It took only a few moments to get all four engines running.
Things happened quickly after that. The pilots ran a series of checklists, testing every system, backup system, and function aboard their plane. The TACAN radio receiver was not passing its self-test, but the avionics maintenance “Red Ball” team had a spare part out to the aircraft and installed in record time. They certainly could’ve launched without a TACAN receiver — with all the sophisticated inertial and satellite navigation gear on board, the old TACAN was seldom used except on precision instrument approaches — but it was a required piece of equipment. Furness’s flight checked in precisely at the prebriefed time. Patrick copied the mission clearance and command post clearance, then began to taxi out.
Except for a sudden brief loss of the nosewheel steering system in Rinc’s plane, which was corrected immediately by recycling the system, the flight taxied out without incident. A large crowd of onlookers was up on the roof of both commercial airline terminal buildings at Reno-Tahoe International, watching the two-ship of B-1B bombers taxiing out for takeoff. All the commercial flights had been cleared onto the parallel runway to make way for the military flights, but several stopped to watch the Bones parade by. Almost everyone based at Reno International knew that the 111th Bomb Squadron was getting some sort of evaluation, and a few knew that these planes carried live weapons, so they recognized that this was something special.
They received a “last chance” inspection at the end of the runway by the supervisor of flying behind the steel revetments in the runway hammerhead. “Looks like you got a nick in the left nosewheel tire, Rodeo,” the SOF radioed via the maintenance officer’s intercom cord. “Must’ve happened when your nosewheel steering cut out.”
“Any cords showing?” Rinc asked.
“I see two cord belts.”
“Shit,” Rinc muttered. That meant an abort to change the tire. A Bone near max gross weight with a bald spot on a nose gear tire was not a good place to be. “Screw it. We’ll take it.”
“You sure about that?” Patrick asked.
“The book says we can take up to three cords—”
“But at gross weight?”
“It doesn’t give a gross weight restriction, sir,” Seaver pressed. “Besides, we’re forty thousand
“We’re going off station to a forward-deployment base that probably won’t have the gear we need to change tires,” Patrick said. “Better to get it changed now rather than take a broken bird to a forward bare-base.”
“This is our pre-D launch, General — we’re talking about Probability to Launch and Survive points,” Rinc emphasized. “PLS isn’t a factor once we get to our deployment base. But if we lose PLS points due to a late launch, we get hammered. We’ll be okay with two cords missing. You should know that the tires have twelve cord belts, and even with five gone we’ve got a wide safety margin. We’re still legal. Let’s get the hell outta here and go drop some iron.” Patrick hesitated. Seaver added irritably, “Unless you’re going to order me to get it changed.”
“You’re the boss,” Patrick said.
“SOF, I’m taking the plane,” Rinc said, nodding to his guest copilot. “Finish up and clear the runway for launch.”
“Roger dodger, Rodeo,” the SOF said. He finished his drive-arounds and found nothing else wrong with any of the planes. “Aces Two-Zero flight, pins and streamers pulled, doors closed, and you appear to be in takeoff configuration. Penetrate, decimate, and dominate. SOF is clear. Break. Reno tower, Aces SOF, clear me on three- four left for a last-chance runway inspection.”
“Aces SOF, Reno tower, clear on three-four left, report when off.” The SOF sped down the runway, making a last inspection for anything that might cause damage to the Bones during takeoff. Once the SOF cleared off the runway, it was time for departure.
Patrick had forgotten what a takeoff in the B-1B was like. He had flown lots of different aircraft, including supersonic bombers, but there was something different about the raw power meshed with the physical size of the Bone that made takeoffs even more spectacular in this plane than in any other.
As soon as Rebecca Furness in Aces Two-Zero started rolling, Rinc Seaver lined up on centerline, locked the brakes using his toes on top of the rudder pedals, then started to feed in power. The sound was muted, silky smooth, with no trace of rattle or “burping” as in the G-model B-52s Patrick used to fly. Rinc moved the throttles up to military power, paused to let all four engines stabilize, then cracked the throttles into afterburner range. He watched as the eight afterburner initiator lights illuminated, then released brakes and pushed the throttles to max AB.
Acceleration was rapid but not very dramatic in military power — but when those four huge afterburners lit and power was moved to max AB, the thrust and acceleration snapped Patrick’s eyes open. The ejection seat felt as though it came up and smacked him in the back of the head. He had felt afterburner kicks plenty of times, but usually it was just that — a kick and nothing more. In the Bone, a constant, steady pressure that forced him deep into his seat followed that nice hard kick. It was like flying in a rocket ship headed for earth orbit. Patrick hadn’t felt G-forces like that in a long time. The pressure and acceleration made his head spin — it seemed as if the deck was inclined at least forty-five degrees.
Seaver’s little “departure show” routine didn’t help Patrick’s stomach. Rinc lifted only about one hundred feet off the runway, pushed the nose over to hold that altitude, then raised the gear and flaps and swept the wings back to twenty-four degrees. He accelerated to well over four hundred knots — at max afterburner, it only took a few seconds — then, as he blasted between the twin towers of the Nugget Casino and the Hilton Hotel Casino, he wagged the wings twice before lifting the Bone on its fiery tail. Their 400,000-pound bird suddenly did become a rocket ship, headed skyward at almost ten thousand feet per minute. Rinc didn’t revert to a more conventional climb-out until passing twelve thousand feet, when he pulled back to military power at 350 knots. They leveled off at twenty-one thousand feet in no time.
John Long reported “tied on radar” and fed continuous position information on the flight leader, and the formation quickly joined up. After closing to tight wingtip formation to check one another out, Rinc extended to
