recycle, a process that took two minutes under ideal conditions. And with each firing, the gun literally tried to pull itself apart. Maintaining it in working order was, so far at least, very expensive.
Turk counted another negative to the weapon, though this was never mentioned by its builders. Great precision was needed to target a moving adversary, and the forces created as the weapon was fired made the Tigershark hard to control at all but top speed. These facts combined to dictate that the aircraft be flown entirely by the computer during the combat sequence. In other words, he had to hand the stick over to the silicon to take his shot.
He didn’t particularly like that. No computer was ever going to be as good as he was at flying. Ever.
Turk had joined the Air Force to fly. He was good at it — very good, he liked to think. He’d flown everything the service had given him — from F–16s to Flighthawks. In his not too humble opinion, he was the best. It irked him to give up the stick, even if he wasn’t literally standing back out of the way. But that was the way it was.
In a very real sense, he knew he was lucky to have a job where his seat was actually in a cockpit. All of the good young jocks were headed toward UAV programs now, a dramatic switch from just a few years ago. Unmanned planes were the Air Force’s future.
That sucked. There was nothing like the smell of rapidly evaporating jet fuel to get you moving in the morning, he thought. He took one last whiff and plugged up, snugging the Tigershark’s cockpit.
Time to rock and roll.
“Control to Tiger One, Tiger One, you read?” prompted the control tower.
“Copy, Control, strong read.”
“Status?”
Part of Turk wanted to give a real wise guy answer — maybe something like, “I feel like I gotta pee.” But the flight control computer at Dreamland that was talking to him had
Or so she claimed.
“Write me up?” he’d laughed. “I just discovered a flaw in your stupid computer program.”
“You caused two flight ranges to shut down.”
“Better we found the problem now rather than in battle,” said Turk.
“Hey, make yourself happy. What are you gonna do, give me a parking ticket?”
Twenty minutes later his boss, Breanna Stockard, had called from D.C., telling him that if the three-star general commanding Dreamland complained about him again, he was going to be reassigned to clean toilets in the coldest part of Alaska.
So Turk was very straight today when dealing with the computer controller.
“Status is green,” said the pilot. “Awaiting clearance to take off.”
“Tiger One you are cleared to proceed on the filed flight plan. You are cleared for takeoff.”
The computer continued, giving him a rundown of the weather conditions. They were basically the same as they always were at Brown Lake: clear skies, unlimited visibility.
“Engines, military power,” said Turk, powering up from soft idle. The power plants — there were actually four of them, though they worked as an integrated unit — came on with a soft thud. The aircraft immediately began to shake. Turk worked his control surfaces quickly, getting green status lights on the right side of his visor. He could choose to use the LED screens on the aircraft — there was no glass canopy — but generally left that as a backup. His smart helmet could do everything the computer-controlled screen could, and was connected directly to the plane.
Turk checked through his instruments for his last takeoff checklist, meticulously looking at each indicator even though the computer would have alerted him if anything was out of spec. Then he took a long, deep breath, slowly emptying his lungs.
“Let’s go,” he told the plane, simultaneously reaching for the throttle.
And they were off.
All airplanes are built to fly. Engines on full and left completely on their own, their wings would gladly propel themselves through the air, straight and level, forever. Or at least until their fuel ran out.
The Tigershark didn’t
Speed is lift. Turk’s job was basically to manage that lift, using it to get from Point A to Point B and back again. To do that in the Tigershark, he had to think not just of Point A and B and all the subpoints in between, but Point C and D, and a little bit of E and F on either side of the wings. Because living at Mach 2.3, the aircraft’s normal cruise speed, entailed certain responsibilities.
Things happened relatively fast at that speed — more than twice as fast as they happened in most fighters. Turk had advanced radar and avionics systems that helped show him what else was around and likely to happen on any given vector, but as good as the computer was, it couldn’t really predict the future.
Not that he could, of course. But he did have a certain feel for it.
It wasn’t that the Tigershark couldn’t fly below the speed of sound. But the high-speed maneuvers it was capable of — the aircraft was designed to withstand over 18 g’s, a force that would crush its pilot in an old-style g- suit — required enormous flight energy.
It was a trade: the Tigershark gave the god of flight velocity and lift, and in return the god of flight let it make a 150-degree turn in the space a Piper would have used at something like a hundredth of the speed.
But the god of flight did not take IOUs — if the Tigershark was a few knots short, she was severely punished. High-speed stalls and spins were a fact of life in the Tigershark. Even after a year’s worth of flying it, Turk was required to practice dealing with them in a flight simulator twice a week.
The sessions were far more grueling than anything he encountered in the air, which was the point. He was good: he could deal with even the most unusual flight blip — his term — nearly as quickly as the plane’s flight command computer. But he still found the workouts taxing.
Today’s flight, by contrast, was a piece of cake. All he had to do was practice a few loops and rolls for the dog and pony show they were hosting in a few days.
Low pass on the runway. Zip-zip. Climb. Turn at the top. Dive and recover.
Enter Sabres, stage right.
Though they looked nothing alike, in many ways the Sabres were smaller versions of the Tigershark, capable of making very sharp maneuvers at high rates of speed. They didn’t have anywhere near the Tigershark’s top end, however; they would accelerate to roughly Mach 3, but used a great deal of fuel getting there. What they could do better than the Tigershark was fly slowly, all the way down to 100 knots at their service ceiling, which was roughly 68,000 feet. The secret was their wings, which could be extended — rolled out was a more descriptive and accurate term — turning them into high-altitude gliders. With solar cells embedded in their skin, the aircraft could power down their engines and loiter over an area for hours.
There were trade-offs. For one, the extended wings made it easy for properly configured radar to spot them. But all things considered, the Sabres were the most capable unmanned air vehicles or UAVs ever produced. They bore the same relationship to the Flighthawks — their immediate predecessors — as their namesake, the F–86 Sabre, bore to the P–38 Lightning.
Turk rocked the Tigershark through the opening maneuvers of his display routine, cranking the plane straight up as four Sabres rocked in from opposite directions. The little planes came up around him, crisscrossing as he climbed. It was very impressive from the ground — the planes looked as if they were a reverse fountain of water. In the cockpit, it was more than a little on the boring side: all Turk did was fly straight up, putting the nose of the aircraft through a blue guide circle on his screen supplied by Medusa, which was interfacing with the Tigershark’s flight computer.
An indicator in the right-hand corner of his screen began counting down his next maneuver. When it hit zero, he pushed right, diving between two of the Sabres. As he sliced downward, the little planes followed, crisscrossing
