And more from the same mysterious pilot.....
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Every year some of the Habu make a courtesy call to Beale AFB. It’s a sort of tradition – especially for new birds built in the previous year – to make their pilgrimage to the ancient home of the Habu. Newly qualified Pilots are sent to pay homage to The Jet.
It’s worked into a training rotation where we get our hours up in the soup learning all the weird shit real aerodynamics can do to fake planes. The rest of us get to fly out of an airstrip in the west of Nevada with barely enough space to stop and a warning hanging over our shoulders not to fly inside a particular box in case we cause an international incident by spooking the spooks.
So, I’m shaking the desert dust out of my flight suit in our canteen when a runner comes in with a new set of orders, direct from the top.
We’ve been asked to take a trip over to Beale on a courtesy call.
Okay. We’re kind of busy with a tight schedule, but I can make an overnight hop, maybe burn up the flight line with the cans. And then the runner tells me we’re picking up a rider for a trip – a nature photographer - “Promoting interplanetary good-will”
Now, taking riders aboard is one of the worst parts of the job. It’s something of a right of passage. You’re not a true fighter pilot until you’ve had to taxi some VIP from God-knows-What rock in the back seat for a sightseeing tour trying to sell a security contract, or a whole spacecraft, smiling through your teeth the whole time you’re going through the friendly routine while trying to make them feel like a flying God even after puking half their breakfast up.
Sometimes they can be interesting people, maybe even entertaining, but most of the time they’re just goddamned riders. Someone who’s either been invited along, or worse, paid for their time aboard.
I pray for a breakdown or a schedule slip. Sorry, no can do, we’re behind schedule as it is.
And then I get a name.
And now some riders you just got to take.
Either the chance to see even an imitation of the Sled’s great rival has piqued some curiosities, or someone somewhere thought it a good idea to stump up the appearance fee - But it’s a good way to get us some good publicity. There’ll be pictures. There’ll be blog posts. Do a good job with this celebrity and the Roughriders look good.
Now to get permission to land at an operational US facility, they effectively strip you naked. They want to know what your grandparents did and if they may have done something potentially illegal way back in history. No, I have not been a member of the communist party. I have never harboured terrorist sympathies and my parents were never illegal immigrants anywhere, and I passed a drug test.
And then you realise, they probably know more about you than you do.
Both for myself, and Chatterbox, even if she’s just running the Nav and Fish-Finder for the short hop over. And the guys with the ground starters since the batteries on The Bitch couldn’t start herself in the heat.
We’re under explicit instructions to fly inside a specific corridor at a specific speed that’s below the sound barrier. A pair of T-100’s come up to say hello and show us the way in and take pictures all the way. I remember thinking that, if I’m ever going to screw up a landing, it’ll be this one.
There’s the usual cultural communication issues between services trying to speak in the same language despite completely different procedures, but The Bitch finds her feet on solid ground again without even a bounce. Now follow the car to a secure area far away from anything, right over by those antennae over there.
I’m beginning to wonder if maybe this isn’t just an excuse to get a closer look at what we’re doing. All of our active sensors are shut down anyway to avoid accidentally microwaving people on the ground.
Our Habu start chattering about their sacred home being violated by an upstart. They’ve gathered their usual accompaniment of Jet Lice eager to get close to a legend – or the nearest thing to one still flying anyway.
Our VIP is waiting for us at the flight line, ready to meet and great.
And the first thing he does – after we get through the expected pleasantries and geeking over meeting an actual sled driver- is point at the Mig ask how old she is.
So I tell him straight up, it’s a six month old spacecraft. Brand new. With serial number 007 on the maker plate.
The question comes back in that boyish voice. Why is it rusting?
Because it’s made mostly of steel.
Now that raises some eyebrows, so of course, in a tense moment it’s natural for me to explain that somebody had bought most of the Soviet Union’s titanium supply right around the time they were building the original version.
That get’s me a laugh and breaks the tension. Everyone knows what I’m referring to. Like Tyrion said, use it as armour. It doesn’t feel right.
Still, there’s nothing like being talked down to make you determined to put up a good show. It’s the Pilot gene. You might call your jet The Bitch in private but in public when shit starts to get thrown, The Grey Lady’s were without parallel.
They think they’re so superior.
As far as we were concerned, in that moment, the only thing we couldn’t do was take turn inside an AU, and the only ship we couldn’t pass was a tanker.
For everything else, we had our squadron motto.
Alpha Mike Foxtrot.
Things got just that little bit heated in a friendly sort of way they usually do between rival pilots.
Of course, the Blackbird needed ultra-specialised, bleeding edge hardware to rivet and weld together. The Russian’s built washing machines on the Mig’s tooling when production orders became slow.
Something you got to remember about both aircraft is, for all that you can point to the top-line figures, they existed in entirely different worlds. Your Habu flew from an environmentally controlled maintenance hanger, to an environmentally controlled maintenance hanger. The Migs flew from concrete fields in Siberia., to deserts in Syria.
The SR was built to go up, and stay up, going as fast as possible when it got there. The Mig was built to get up there as fast as possible, and bring whatever was up there down.
Even the later Foxhounds we were based had an entirely different mission – they went up high where few could get ‘em, loitered until a ground-hugging target appeared below, dashed at high speed to intercept and dropped a missile or ten on it from 20km above. And potentially from a 100km away.
They denied whole swathes of airspace to the enemy.
To which, the natural response is that the Blackbird wasn’t stopped….
Our own Sled Drivers betray us, siding with the enemy. It’s Chatterbox and me defending the honor of the Grey Lady all by ourselves.
At which point, Chatterbox, demonstrating she came to us from an office chair rather than flight school decides to point out that we’re not flying a real Mig, and those aren’t real Blackbirds outside so the argument we’re having is no different from one about sports teams after the match.
Silence answers her.
Nobody feels good about home truths. Especially a former Bleacher Bum like myself.
We sleep on it in the guest quarters. Jeremiah is no longer permitted at official functions.
Morning. Chatterbox is giving our guest a run through of what he’ll need to do in the back seat. Here’s a crib sheet for the Nav. Here’s a crib-sheet for the Fish-Finder. She’s the only one of us that’s not in any way star struck.
He’s just another rider to her. She hands him the flightplan datacard with the TERNAV mapping and black lines on it, and a quick instruction on how to load it up into the ship’s brains. It’s probably the first bit of honest work done since yesterday.
She later tells me that he asked a lot of specific questions, just to go some way towards earning his passage into our world, by understanding what he needed to do back there.
Meanwhile, our guys are trying to impress everyone by eating the traditional breakfast. Most of us left the Steak and Eggs phase sometime after basic when we realised we impressed nobody. I take my cereal by myself with my own prep to do making pen lines on a kneeboard map and sketching out some waypoints for a borrowed 430 in case something goes wrong.
There’s time taken to fuel the bird and get our passenger suited up. I’ve got my flightsuit, but he has to use a standard bubble-suit since our stuff’s custom moulded. We have a set of spare harnesses for just such an occasion so it’s only a small hassle to fit them, but it does limit the experience.
The ship is fuelled and checked. Our guys sort a fuel leak from the left tank caused by a stuck pressure relief. Coolant tanks topped off. I walk our guest through the usual pre-flight ritual blessing by our lady of blessed acceleration.
You feel like a fool doing until that one time you don’t bother. Then you learn.
I help our guest strap himself in with one boot on the left console and both my hands around the seatbelts to pull them tight, then make sure he knows where the quick release is, where his emergency oxygen is and set the ejection seat into ‘rider mode’.
Or, if he pulls the chicken handles by accident, he goes on his own.
We flip through our checklists, taking longer than normal as he’s pecking at unfamiliar panels hunting for switches and keys. I remember thinking I wouldn’t want to take someone who didn’t have any sort of flight experience up in one of these.
My life’s in his hands if he makes a mistake.
We have one tanker with us and it is serving our trainees today, so if we go off the line and too far out over the brine and run out of gas, we’re swimming.
The engines are retuned and configured for air-breathing flight. Oxygen set. Fuel inerter. Batteries. Inverter. Ground Power. Hoovers hooked up to the right hand engine.
I give the signal and the starter turbine shrieks into life, the old Boeing APU giving everything it’s got to pump enough air into the right engine’s starters. The needles bounce up off their stop on the tachometer, turbine blades chattering and moaning in protest as they wind themselves up.
It’s like waking an old dragon from its slumber. These are big, high strung engines tuned for wide-open power and not much else. They don’t like being started, especially when cold. Raw fuel drains out the tailpipe onto the ground.
A nudge on the throttle adds a shot of Jeremiah Weed to the mix and she lights with a bang, flaring off the last of the fuel. The whine builds up to through a deep air-raid siren. Lights on the panels spark on as the VSD’s hook the generators up. Wreathed in smoke, the ship comes to life, rattling and humming, rising to a deep, whining moan that sounds like nothing else.
Starting the second involves motoring the first to the point where it’ll generate enough gas to drive over the second, without overreving on cold oil and scragging its bearings, or dropping off the generator and interrupting the computer.
It makes a change from the Three-Button-Start in a Veritech on QRA.
We both flick through checklists. He’s in the back getting acquainted with the complex parts of the NAV system, telling the ship what part of the universe it’s starting off in, and where it’s going to go and how fast it’s going to get there.
You can’t just kick the tyres and light the fires in this ship.
The brake hiss off and the ship lurches forward. We take our place in the flightline queue behind a flight of old Mudhens which, combined, weigh less than we do, and a KC-80 that also weighs less than we do. Our engines growl through the upper intake doors.
We park up at the start of the runway watching the tanker crawl into the sky.
Nobody lines up to watch us take-off. Nobody cares about a rusting Mig.
Oh well. I key open the mic to call for clearance. Best get the show started.
“Foxhound One-One request maximum performance take-off. Expedited climb to flight level niner zero zero. “
There is just that little moment where the controller wonders if we’re yanking him before he remembers we’re a fencraft that might aswell run on pixie dust and unicorn farts for what they can do.
I’m sure my passenger raises an eyebrow. But down here, we’re doing it with brute thrust and aerodynamics. We’re faster in atmospheric mode, with no fancy physics-warping in the way.
“Cleared for take-off, Foxhound One-One. Expedited to flight level niner zero zero. Wind Two-Three-Five at Two meters per second.”
I give a moment for Shephard’s prayer before pushing the throttles up. Both cans light off and the acceleration is hand-of-god instant. Not a kick, but a constant, irresistible push.
Equivalent airspeed hits 300. Nose up. And climb.
It takes 10 minutes and 16 seconds, from brake release, to level flight at Angels Ninety
It takes nearly half of our fuel load.
“It does get up some,”
I agree with a murmur, more focused on keeping it up there.
“I remember seeing those Migs come up. You’d pick ‘em up when they took off and five minutes later they were at seventy-thou and turning back because they didn’t have enough fuel,”
“Fuel’s our big issue too,” I say, “We use it for regenerative cooling in the engines, then dump it through the cans”
From the factory, she used refrigerant tanks. Using fuel gave us a little extra range on the cans, at the expense of a lot of range when off it.
With my head in the cockpit, I didn’t have enough time to say much more. There’s no headspace left for showing off like a typical rider flight. At full speed, the ship demands all your attention, rattling and moving, forever trying to inch itself out of your control. We do a few rolls, demonstrate some of our capabilities by tracking those Mudhens still scratching around the nap of the Earth, then grab a few pictures.
That’s Oregon. That’s Mexico. That’s Colorado. That’s someone’s Winnebago on the way to orbit.
I’d kind of readied myself for the whole ‘In the Blackbird we could…’ conversation, but it never comes. We’re each just that bit too busy, either taking pictures, or trying not to kill us both. The ship’s humming along, seemingly aware that she needed to impress.
Your old nemesis sits in the rear seat.
The director on the HUD switches, telling me we’ve passed the last waypoint. I tip the ship into a gentle banked turn swinging us around back to the coast – just to the North of LA.
Far below, a Cessna pipes up on the radio with a groundspeed call. The old game’s afoot when a King Air speaks up on the same frequency. Then a Lightning…. It’s a game that can’t have changed much in forty years, even if the aircraft involved have.
You know the story. I glance at the ground speed indicator and I think about making the call. I think about asking him if he wants to do it. I think, wouldn’t it be cool to replay that moment? I’ve got the guy with me and a chance to do the famous thing.
It’s sitting right there.
My finger finds the radio button.
“Centre, Foxhound One-One, good evening…”
“Foxhound One-One, Centre, go ahead…”
He sees us. He sees our ground speed. He knows what’s coming. Oh God, not one of these idiots.
“Centre, Foxhound One-One, request descent to flight level three-zero-zero. Vector to Beale,”
I think, after a week of dealing with our sled drivers he’s almost relieved. Someone just wants to get somewhere and that’s what he does best. We get our clearance with good cheer.
It’d be as crass as all those idiots badgering the guests at Cons. It’s just not our thing is it? Like badgering GRRM about who dies next at Convention, or wondering if The Winds of Winter would finally be released. This isn’t a Blackbird. And these days, scooting along halfway to orbit at 1900 across the ground just isn’t that big a deal.
Not when that Winnebago’s on its way to orbit.
It just wouldn’t have meant anything. It would’ve been gratuitous in the worst possible way. A hollow moment made possible by the wave - not entirely real.
I pull the throttles back from loud to quiet, force open the surge doors and point the nose down. Fun’s over, time to land before we need to swim. The Mig protests, wanting to show off some more. She creaks and groans the whole way down, superheated skin contracting as it hits supercooled air.
Fast descents make for some alarming noises. Like the Titanic sinking./
In amongst the mundane traffic, between an Airbus and a Boeing, with the ship set on autopilot and the GoPros off, we have a chance to actually talk. About the sort of missions we’re taking on, my time with our Sled, his time with the real one. Our first active mission. The differences between the original Blackbird and the Current ones.
Eventually he asks me why I volunteered to fly the Mig.
I have to admit that I didn’t This isn’t a ship our pilots volunteer for.* And he asks me why.
You’ve got three big groups of Pilots. You’ve got the Habu people – the people who read Sled Driver and hung models of that sleek black dagger above their bed at night and dreamt of reflected glory like I did, and the Tomcat people who dream of shirtless men, roofies and the Danger Zone and as far as they’re concerned the Third Group is made up of anyone not good enough to be one of the first two
(Some say there’s another group, consisting of the heavy bomber pilots, but what makes them get up in the morning is best not mentioned in polite company. And the less said about Hog-people, the better)
The point is, none of those are the sort of people who’re interested in being a bus driver for a geek, or flying the ship that so obviously came in second best to their Hero.
I give him the short version of that explanation. It just doesn’t fit the image of The Fighter Pilot they want to become.
To which he says, “Well it seems like you guys are starting to do a lot of exciting things. Maybe you just got to sell it to them,”
I don’t really think he gets it.
This ship can do so many things. The ones flying under the JLI flag keep up with Woodsman drones making attack runs, wasping up the enemy defences while designating targets to the drones. We don’t just do strategic reconnaissance – we’re into the Wild Weasel role because we can carry a few missiles while putting up a strong electronic attack and defense.
We can datalink and guide a whole group in, or spit our take back to base even while we’re still evading missiles so GJ can make the call on the moment whether to strike or not. Or with what.
But, ask us to engage in a dogfight and you’re asking us to die. Most targets that aren’t bombers can evade us and we can’t turn to follow.
The Habu guys see an aircraft that knocks out both Zigs before getting swarmed by optical missiles as it tries to get close enough to engage with anti-ship missiles. The Valkyrie guys see a ship that’s either going too fast it can’t hit them, or turns so slowly it can’t avoid them. We don’t have the ability to illuminate an entire solar system like the AWACS people, especially without a full crew to give guidance, and the Valkyries can do the Wild-Weasel thing when given the right FAST-pack – and take out far more bad guys in the process.
They see the workload in the cockpit to keep the big ship flying, how the pilot’s just there to drive while the back seater does the spy work, and the level of ground-crew work needed to get a mission going.
They don’t get to see the strategic stuff we do. They don’t realise that having us orbiting closer than an AWACs nearly trebles their combat effectiveness and SA, or that we’re the one’s spotting up all the targets they get to shoot while defeating all the missiles coming up to say ‘hi’.
We’re better off Buffing at the back, rather than Killing at the front. And that’s just not exciting.
The biggest problem we have is that we are not cool. We’re flying a big steel brute of a ship that rusts, not something elegant and sleek. I don’t know how the fastest combat aircraft in Fenspace could be as romantic and inspiring as a Communist apartment block, but the Foxhound manages it.
We are the hard work that goes unnoticed, alongside the tankers and transports.
There’s no glow to bask in. No radiation of awesome because of something its lookalike once did. It doesn’t make you feel awesome just by sitting in it. It doesn’t let you be your own image of the hero. It forces you to rely on your own cool, your own ego, while ruthlessly revealing the gaps in your skill when either of them don't measure up.
It doesn’t let you be the hero you think you deserve to be. It requires you to become the hero you probably aren’t yet.
For a people who’ve been gaining their awesome on handwaved credit for years, it’s quite the bump – a feeling like the Sherriff knocking on the door serving up the final reminder that you’re not as rich as you’ve been pretending to be.
When you’re used to being awesome with a wave of a hand, it just seems like so much effort, for so little reward.
It’s not something my passenger would understand. He comes from a different era where even the work we need to do would’ve been considered a handwave.
“It’s a cultural thing,”, I say. “We just don’t fit in with the Pilot culture,”
He gets that.
We were approaching the runway, with just enough fuel left in the tanks for a single go-around. Sure enough, the Habu are waiting warming up on the flight line for us to get out of their sky. They’re used to being the Kings. The Jet Lice, eager to get the image of a dozen of them taxiing away before launching as squadrons, are waiting too.
It’s a cool picture for an impossibly cool plane. Nobody cares about us. The only thing that important is that I don’t break the celebrity in the back. I glance at the airspeed.
Well. My finger finds the mic switch again.
“Tower, Foxhound One-One. Overspeeding. Going around.”
I don’t even wait for the confirmation. With the big boys dropped and the ship slow and configured for landing we’re well off the back of the power curve when I push up to full burner, guzzling twenty litres of kerosene every second, trailing columns of black smoke and dirty orange flame.
It’s a noise like something that launched an Apollo capsule. At less than a hundred feet, it borders on Seismic, rattling windows, deafening the Jet Lice and leaving a trail of terrified car alarms and blown iPhone mics in its wake. Dinosaurs long dead roar one final time as we swallow more fuel in a quarter mile than a top fuel dragster.
It is gratuitous. It is crass. It is one giant middle finger born out of frustration at being the ‘upstart’. You can’t do this shit in a Habu with an image to protect, but we can. With a little wiggle of the wings to say ‘Hi There!’ before banking it over the flight line.
I can hear laughter from behind. “I think I got a real good picture of that too.”
And I have to smile. “They just look so happy and sure of themselves down there, someone had to do it.”
Because if they want to look down on us, I figure I’m going to make them look up just this once.
Of course, the Tower is not too pleased, and neither are the Habu. The local Pilots loved it. The local Leaves hated it. Questions would be asked at official levels.
We land, and the passenger gets mobbed for his polite opinion while I get a warning. The Habu go off on their way, feathers ruffled, making as much noise as they can on the way up.
Of course it’s an impressive sight. It has to be. They can’t let the insult stand. Upstarts need to be taught their place. I knew I’d earned the unkindness of ravens, for a short while at least.
But, I think I drew a line in the sand. This is one upstart that’s not going to learn. We are not the jet that exists just to come in second, to be a killmark on a Valkyrie, or become a place for the washouts to finally washup.
We are here and doing awesome things too. And they belong to us and us alone.
Or as I explain to a bewildered Chatterbox, ‘It’s a Pilot Thing’
That’s when I knew I’d found my place.
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*Russian members have since corrected me, with a barrage of transfer requests once it became clear we we’re building up to at least a full group of these with a squadron of the strike variant. And, I am told, there is vicious competition amongst the old crows to get away from the analysts desk and into the back seat. It’s nice to know that she does have admirers.
And a little Bird tells me there’ll be a book out soon, detailing the history of the Mig-25, 31 and 41. There’s a lot more to these jet’s than just being second fiddle to the SR-71. The Wings of the Red Star have their own stories to tell.
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Every year some of the Habu make a courtesy call to Beale AFB. It’s a sort of tradition – especially for new birds built in the previous year – to make their pilgrimage to the ancient home of the Habu. Newly qualified Pilots are sent to pay homage to The Jet.
It’s worked into a training rotation where we get our hours up in the soup learning all the weird shit real aerodynamics can do to fake planes. The rest of us get to fly out of an airstrip in the west of Nevada with barely enough space to stop and a warning hanging over our shoulders not to fly inside a particular box in case we cause an international incident by spooking the spooks.
So, I’m shaking the desert dust out of my flight suit in our canteen when a runner comes in with a new set of orders, direct from the top.
We’ve been asked to take a trip over to Beale on a courtesy call.
Okay. We’re kind of busy with a tight schedule, but I can make an overnight hop, maybe burn up the flight line with the cans. And then the runner tells me we’re picking up a rider for a trip – a nature photographer - “Promoting interplanetary good-will”
Now, taking riders aboard is one of the worst parts of the job. It’s something of a right of passage. You’re not a true fighter pilot until you’ve had to taxi some VIP from God-knows-What rock in the back seat for a sightseeing tour trying to sell a security contract, or a whole spacecraft, smiling through your teeth the whole time you’re going through the friendly routine while trying to make them feel like a flying God even after puking half their breakfast up.
Sometimes they can be interesting people, maybe even entertaining, but most of the time they’re just goddamned riders. Someone who’s either been invited along, or worse, paid for their time aboard.
I pray for a breakdown or a schedule slip. Sorry, no can do, we’re behind schedule as it is.
And then I get a name.
And now some riders you just got to take.
Either the chance to see even an imitation of the Sled’s great rival has piqued some curiosities, or someone somewhere thought it a good idea to stump up the appearance fee - But it’s a good way to get us some good publicity. There’ll be pictures. There’ll be blog posts. Do a good job with this celebrity and the Roughriders look good.
Now to get permission to land at an operational US facility, they effectively strip you naked. They want to know what your grandparents did and if they may have done something potentially illegal way back in history. No, I have not been a member of the communist party. I have never harboured terrorist sympathies and my parents were never illegal immigrants anywhere, and I passed a drug test.
And then you realise, they probably know more about you than you do.
Both for myself, and Chatterbox, even if she’s just running the Nav and Fish-Finder for the short hop over. And the guys with the ground starters since the batteries on The Bitch couldn’t start herself in the heat.
We’re under explicit instructions to fly inside a specific corridor at a specific speed that’s below the sound barrier. A pair of T-100’s come up to say hello and show us the way in and take pictures all the way. I remember thinking that, if I’m ever going to screw up a landing, it’ll be this one.
There’s the usual cultural communication issues between services trying to speak in the same language despite completely different procedures, but The Bitch finds her feet on solid ground again without even a bounce. Now follow the car to a secure area far away from anything, right over by those antennae over there.
I’m beginning to wonder if maybe this isn’t just an excuse to get a closer look at what we’re doing. All of our active sensors are shut down anyway to avoid accidentally microwaving people on the ground.
Our Habu start chattering about their sacred home being violated by an upstart. They’ve gathered their usual accompaniment of Jet Lice eager to get close to a legend – or the nearest thing to one still flying anyway.
Our VIP is waiting for us at the flight line, ready to meet and great.
And the first thing he does – after we get through the expected pleasantries and geeking over meeting an actual sled driver- is point at the Mig ask how old she is.
So I tell him straight up, it’s a six month old spacecraft. Brand new. With serial number 007 on the maker plate.
The question comes back in that boyish voice. Why is it rusting?
Because it’s made mostly of steel.
Now that raises some eyebrows, so of course, in a tense moment it’s natural for me to explain that somebody had bought most of the Soviet Union’s titanium supply right around the time they were building the original version.
That get’s me a laugh and breaks the tension. Everyone knows what I’m referring to. Like Tyrion said, use it as armour. It doesn’t feel right.
Still, there’s nothing like being talked down to make you determined to put up a good show. It’s the Pilot gene. You might call your jet The Bitch in private but in public when shit starts to get thrown, The Grey Lady’s were without parallel.
They think they’re so superior.
As far as we were concerned, in that moment, the only thing we couldn’t do was take turn inside an AU, and the only ship we couldn’t pass was a tanker.
For everything else, we had our squadron motto.
Alpha Mike Foxtrot.
Things got just that little bit heated in a friendly sort of way they usually do between rival pilots.
Of course, the Blackbird needed ultra-specialised, bleeding edge hardware to rivet and weld together. The Russian’s built washing machines on the Mig’s tooling when production orders became slow.
Something you got to remember about both aircraft is, for all that you can point to the top-line figures, they existed in entirely different worlds. Your Habu flew from an environmentally controlled maintenance hanger, to an environmentally controlled maintenance hanger. The Migs flew from concrete fields in Siberia., to deserts in Syria.
The SR was built to go up, and stay up, going as fast as possible when it got there. The Mig was built to get up there as fast as possible, and bring whatever was up there down.
Even the later Foxhounds we were based had an entirely different mission – they went up high where few could get ‘em, loitered until a ground-hugging target appeared below, dashed at high speed to intercept and dropped a missile or ten on it from 20km above. And potentially from a 100km away.
They denied whole swathes of airspace to the enemy.
To which, the natural response is that the Blackbird wasn’t stopped….
Our own Sled Drivers betray us, siding with the enemy. It’s Chatterbox and me defending the honor of the Grey Lady all by ourselves.
At which point, Chatterbox, demonstrating she came to us from an office chair rather than flight school decides to point out that we’re not flying a real Mig, and those aren’t real Blackbirds outside so the argument we’re having is no different from one about sports teams after the match.
Silence answers her.
Nobody feels good about home truths. Especially a former Bleacher Bum like myself.
We sleep on it in the guest quarters. Jeremiah is no longer permitted at official functions.
Morning. Chatterbox is giving our guest a run through of what he’ll need to do in the back seat. Here’s a crib sheet for the Nav. Here’s a crib-sheet for the Fish-Finder. She’s the only one of us that’s not in any way star struck.
He’s just another rider to her. She hands him the flightplan datacard with the TERNAV mapping and black lines on it, and a quick instruction on how to load it up into the ship’s brains. It’s probably the first bit of honest work done since yesterday.
She later tells me that he asked a lot of specific questions, just to go some way towards earning his passage into our world, by understanding what he needed to do back there.
Meanwhile, our guys are trying to impress everyone by eating the traditional breakfast. Most of us left the Steak and Eggs phase sometime after basic when we realised we impressed nobody. I take my cereal by myself with my own prep to do making pen lines on a kneeboard map and sketching out some waypoints for a borrowed 430 in case something goes wrong.
There’s time taken to fuel the bird and get our passenger suited up. I’ve got my flightsuit, but he has to use a standard bubble-suit since our stuff’s custom moulded. We have a set of spare harnesses for just such an occasion so it’s only a small hassle to fit them, but it does limit the experience.
The ship is fuelled and checked. Our guys sort a fuel leak from the left tank caused by a stuck pressure relief. Coolant tanks topped off. I walk our guest through the usual pre-flight ritual blessing by our lady of blessed acceleration.
You feel like a fool doing until that one time you don’t bother. Then you learn.
I help our guest strap himself in with one boot on the left console and both my hands around the seatbelts to pull them tight, then make sure he knows where the quick release is, where his emergency oxygen is and set the ejection seat into ‘rider mode’.
Or, if he pulls the chicken handles by accident, he goes on his own.
We flip through our checklists, taking longer than normal as he’s pecking at unfamiliar panels hunting for switches and keys. I remember thinking I wouldn’t want to take someone who didn’t have any sort of flight experience up in one of these.
My life’s in his hands if he makes a mistake.
We have one tanker with us and it is serving our trainees today, so if we go off the line and too far out over the brine and run out of gas, we’re swimming.
The engines are retuned and configured for air-breathing flight. Oxygen set. Fuel inerter. Batteries. Inverter. Ground Power. Hoovers hooked up to the right hand engine.
I give the signal and the starter turbine shrieks into life, the old Boeing APU giving everything it’s got to pump enough air into the right engine’s starters. The needles bounce up off their stop on the tachometer, turbine blades chattering and moaning in protest as they wind themselves up.
It’s like waking an old dragon from its slumber. These are big, high strung engines tuned for wide-open power and not much else. They don’t like being started, especially when cold. Raw fuel drains out the tailpipe onto the ground.
A nudge on the throttle adds a shot of Jeremiah Weed to the mix and she lights with a bang, flaring off the last of the fuel. The whine builds up to through a deep air-raid siren. Lights on the panels spark on as the VSD’s hook the generators up. Wreathed in smoke, the ship comes to life, rattling and humming, rising to a deep, whining moan that sounds like nothing else.
Starting the second involves motoring the first to the point where it’ll generate enough gas to drive over the second, without overreving on cold oil and scragging its bearings, or dropping off the generator and interrupting the computer.
It makes a change from the Three-Button-Start in a Veritech on QRA.
We both flick through checklists. He’s in the back getting acquainted with the complex parts of the NAV system, telling the ship what part of the universe it’s starting off in, and where it’s going to go and how fast it’s going to get there.
You can’t just kick the tyres and light the fires in this ship.
The brake hiss off and the ship lurches forward. We take our place in the flightline queue behind a flight of old Mudhens which, combined, weigh less than we do, and a KC-80 that also weighs less than we do. Our engines growl through the upper intake doors.
We park up at the start of the runway watching the tanker crawl into the sky.
Nobody lines up to watch us take-off. Nobody cares about a rusting Mig.
Oh well. I key open the mic to call for clearance. Best get the show started.
“Foxhound One-One request maximum performance take-off. Expedited climb to flight level niner zero zero. “
There is just that little moment where the controller wonders if we’re yanking him before he remembers we’re a fencraft that might aswell run on pixie dust and unicorn farts for what they can do.
I’m sure my passenger raises an eyebrow. But down here, we’re doing it with brute thrust and aerodynamics. We’re faster in atmospheric mode, with no fancy physics-warping in the way.
“Cleared for take-off, Foxhound One-One. Expedited to flight level niner zero zero. Wind Two-Three-Five at Two meters per second.”
I give a moment for Shephard’s prayer before pushing the throttles up. Both cans light off and the acceleration is hand-of-god instant. Not a kick, but a constant, irresistible push.
Equivalent airspeed hits 300. Nose up. And climb.
It takes 10 minutes and 16 seconds, from brake release, to level flight at Angels Ninety
It takes nearly half of our fuel load.
“It does get up some,”
I agree with a murmur, more focused on keeping it up there.
“I remember seeing those Migs come up. You’d pick ‘em up when they took off and five minutes later they were at seventy-thou and turning back because they didn’t have enough fuel,”
“Fuel’s our big issue too,” I say, “We use it for regenerative cooling in the engines, then dump it through the cans”
From the factory, she used refrigerant tanks. Using fuel gave us a little extra range on the cans, at the expense of a lot of range when off it.
With my head in the cockpit, I didn’t have enough time to say much more. There’s no headspace left for showing off like a typical rider flight. At full speed, the ship demands all your attention, rattling and moving, forever trying to inch itself out of your control. We do a few rolls, demonstrate some of our capabilities by tracking those Mudhens still scratching around the nap of the Earth, then grab a few pictures.
That’s Oregon. That’s Mexico. That’s Colorado. That’s someone’s Winnebago on the way to orbit.
I’d kind of readied myself for the whole ‘In the Blackbird we could…’ conversation, but it never comes. We’re each just that bit too busy, either taking pictures, or trying not to kill us both. The ship’s humming along, seemingly aware that she needed to impress.
Your old nemesis sits in the rear seat.
The director on the HUD switches, telling me we’ve passed the last waypoint. I tip the ship into a gentle banked turn swinging us around back to the coast – just to the North of LA.
Far below, a Cessna pipes up on the radio with a groundspeed call. The old game’s afoot when a King Air speaks up on the same frequency. Then a Lightning…. It’s a game that can’t have changed much in forty years, even if the aircraft involved have.
You know the story. I glance at the ground speed indicator and I think about making the call. I think about asking him if he wants to do it. I think, wouldn’t it be cool to replay that moment? I’ve got the guy with me and a chance to do the famous thing.
It’s sitting right there.
My finger finds the radio button.
“Centre, Foxhound One-One, good evening…”
“Foxhound One-One, Centre, go ahead…”
He sees us. He sees our ground speed. He knows what’s coming. Oh God, not one of these idiots.
“Centre, Foxhound One-One, request descent to flight level three-zero-zero. Vector to Beale,”
I think, after a week of dealing with our sled drivers he’s almost relieved. Someone just wants to get somewhere and that’s what he does best. We get our clearance with good cheer.
It’d be as crass as all those idiots badgering the guests at Cons. It’s just not our thing is it? Like badgering GRRM about who dies next at Convention, or wondering if The Winds of Winter would finally be released. This isn’t a Blackbird. And these days, scooting along halfway to orbit at 1900 across the ground just isn’t that big a deal.
Not when that Winnebago’s on its way to orbit.
It just wouldn’t have meant anything. It would’ve been gratuitous in the worst possible way. A hollow moment made possible by the wave - not entirely real.
I pull the throttles back from loud to quiet, force open the surge doors and point the nose down. Fun’s over, time to land before we need to swim. The Mig protests, wanting to show off some more. She creaks and groans the whole way down, superheated skin contracting as it hits supercooled air.
Fast descents make for some alarming noises. Like the Titanic sinking./
In amongst the mundane traffic, between an Airbus and a Boeing, with the ship set on autopilot and the GoPros off, we have a chance to actually talk. About the sort of missions we’re taking on, my time with our Sled, his time with the real one. Our first active mission. The differences between the original Blackbird and the Current ones.
Eventually he asks me why I volunteered to fly the Mig.
I have to admit that I didn’t This isn’t a ship our pilots volunteer for.* And he asks me why.
You’ve got three big groups of Pilots. You’ve got the Habu people – the people who read Sled Driver and hung models of that sleek black dagger above their bed at night and dreamt of reflected glory like I did, and the Tomcat people who dream of shirtless men, roofies and the Danger Zone and as far as they’re concerned the Third Group is made up of anyone not good enough to be one of the first two
(Some say there’s another group, consisting of the heavy bomber pilots, but what makes them get up in the morning is best not mentioned in polite company. And the less said about Hog-people, the better)
The point is, none of those are the sort of people who’re interested in being a bus driver for a geek, or flying the ship that so obviously came in second best to their Hero.
I give him the short version of that explanation. It just doesn’t fit the image of The Fighter Pilot they want to become.
To which he says, “Well it seems like you guys are starting to do a lot of exciting things. Maybe you just got to sell it to them,”
I don’t really think he gets it.
This ship can do so many things. The ones flying under the JLI flag keep up with Woodsman drones making attack runs, wasping up the enemy defences while designating targets to the drones. We don’t just do strategic reconnaissance – we’re into the Wild Weasel role because we can carry a few missiles while putting up a strong electronic attack and defense.
We can datalink and guide a whole group in, or spit our take back to base even while we’re still evading missiles so GJ can make the call on the moment whether to strike or not. Or with what.
But, ask us to engage in a dogfight and you’re asking us to die. Most targets that aren’t bombers can evade us and we can’t turn to follow.
The Habu guys see an aircraft that knocks out both Zigs before getting swarmed by optical missiles as it tries to get close enough to engage with anti-ship missiles. The Valkyrie guys see a ship that’s either going too fast it can’t hit them, or turns so slowly it can’t avoid them. We don’t have the ability to illuminate an entire solar system like the AWACS people, especially without a full crew to give guidance, and the Valkyries can do the Wild-Weasel thing when given the right FAST-pack – and take out far more bad guys in the process.
They see the workload in the cockpit to keep the big ship flying, how the pilot’s just there to drive while the back seater does the spy work, and the level of ground-crew work needed to get a mission going.
They don’t get to see the strategic stuff we do. They don’t realise that having us orbiting closer than an AWACs nearly trebles their combat effectiveness and SA, or that we’re the one’s spotting up all the targets they get to shoot while defeating all the missiles coming up to say ‘hi’.
We’re better off Buffing at the back, rather than Killing at the front. And that’s just not exciting.
The biggest problem we have is that we are not cool. We’re flying a big steel brute of a ship that rusts, not something elegant and sleek. I don’t know how the fastest combat aircraft in Fenspace could be as romantic and inspiring as a Communist apartment block, but the Foxhound manages it.
We are the hard work that goes unnoticed, alongside the tankers and transports.
There’s no glow to bask in. No radiation of awesome because of something its lookalike once did. It doesn’t make you feel awesome just by sitting in it. It doesn’t let you be your own image of the hero. It forces you to rely on your own cool, your own ego, while ruthlessly revealing the gaps in your skill when either of them don't measure up.
It doesn’t let you be the hero you think you deserve to be. It requires you to become the hero you probably aren’t yet.
For a people who’ve been gaining their awesome on handwaved credit for years, it’s quite the bump – a feeling like the Sherriff knocking on the door serving up the final reminder that you’re not as rich as you’ve been pretending to be.
When you’re used to being awesome with a wave of a hand, it just seems like so much effort, for so little reward.
It’s not something my passenger would understand. He comes from a different era where even the work we need to do would’ve been considered a handwave.
“It’s a cultural thing,”, I say. “We just don’t fit in with the Pilot culture,”
He gets that.
We were approaching the runway, with just enough fuel left in the tanks for a single go-around. Sure enough, the Habu are waiting warming up on the flight line for us to get out of their sky. They’re used to being the Kings. The Jet Lice, eager to get the image of a dozen of them taxiing away before launching as squadrons, are waiting too.
It’s a cool picture for an impossibly cool plane. Nobody cares about us. The only thing that important is that I don’t break the celebrity in the back. I glance at the airspeed.
Well. My finger finds the mic switch again.
“Tower, Foxhound One-One. Overspeeding. Going around.”
I don’t even wait for the confirmation. With the big boys dropped and the ship slow and configured for landing we’re well off the back of the power curve when I push up to full burner, guzzling twenty litres of kerosene every second, trailing columns of black smoke and dirty orange flame.
It’s a noise like something that launched an Apollo capsule. At less than a hundred feet, it borders on Seismic, rattling windows, deafening the Jet Lice and leaving a trail of terrified car alarms and blown iPhone mics in its wake. Dinosaurs long dead roar one final time as we swallow more fuel in a quarter mile than a top fuel dragster.
It is gratuitous. It is crass. It is one giant middle finger born out of frustration at being the ‘upstart’. You can’t do this shit in a Habu with an image to protect, but we can. With a little wiggle of the wings to say ‘Hi There!’ before banking it over the flight line.
I can hear laughter from behind. “I think I got a real good picture of that too.”
And I have to smile. “They just look so happy and sure of themselves down there, someone had to do it.”
Because if they want to look down on us, I figure I’m going to make them look up just this once.
Of course, the Tower is not too pleased, and neither are the Habu. The local Pilots loved it. The local Leaves hated it. Questions would be asked at official levels.
We land, and the passenger gets mobbed for his polite opinion while I get a warning. The Habu go off on their way, feathers ruffled, making as much noise as they can on the way up.
Of course it’s an impressive sight. It has to be. They can’t let the insult stand. Upstarts need to be taught their place. I knew I’d earned the unkindness of ravens, for a short while at least.
But, I think I drew a line in the sand. This is one upstart that’s not going to learn. We are not the jet that exists just to come in second, to be a killmark on a Valkyrie, or become a place for the washouts to finally washup.
We are here and doing awesome things too. And they belong to us and us alone.
Or as I explain to a bewildered Chatterbox, ‘It’s a Pilot Thing’
That’s when I knew I’d found my place.
---
*Russian members have since corrected me, with a barrage of transfer requests once it became clear we we’re building up to at least a full group of these with a squadron of the strike variant. And, I am told, there is vicious competition amongst the old crows to get away from the analysts desk and into the back seat. It’s nice to know that she does have admirers.
And a little Bird tells me there’ll be a book out soon, detailing the history of the Mig-25, 31 and 41. There’s a lot more to these jet’s than just being second fiddle to the SR-71. The Wings of the Red Star have their own stories to tell.
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.