Launch on Need by Daniel Guiteras (small books to read txt) 📗

was heading home to the USS Saratoga, nervously steaming north-northwest along the Red Sea.

Avery, flying at the head of the traffic pattern, was first in line to land. The rest of the squadron was right behind her—a swarm of hornets returning to its nest—crowding the airspace. The carrier’s coordinates were locked in; her plane knew exactly where it was going.

On the return flight, the prevailing Egyptian winds had returned, and were punching and pushing the planes around; gusts from one direction died out only to immediately attack from another. It was the end of January, Avery thought, much too early for “khamseen,” the Egyptian word for the hot spring wind that blows south across the country and down to the Red Sea.

She was less than 10 miles out and had a visual of the 1,200-mile-long, 190-mile-wide Red Sea. She could not see her carrier yet, at least, not in the way you can see a cruise liner at night, obscenely lit up as they are against the blue-black water. Her night vision goggles were powered up, so through them she saw silver-green “hot spots” against a dark-green background. The carrier was such a massive ship, and yet it seemed to be illuminated by nothing more than a paltry bare-bulb porch light.

Fortunately, Avery’s aircraft was no old-school relic. Besides goggles, she also had a full color digital map of the terrain below, forward-looking infrared and a heads-up display. The plane was returning to the ship as if it were being called, or had no other option.

Finding the ship wasn’t what she was worried about. It was the damn wind. As she neared the ship, she imagined how the wind was likely churning and whipping up the water, moving the ship, and causing her runway target at the stern of the Saratoga to heave up and down.

The carrier’s silver-green wake shimmered faintly from the waxing quarter-moon, but Avery’s night-vision goggles gave no extra clues as to the magnitude of the winds blowing over the ship’s flight deck. Fancy gizmos aside, she knew she would have to bring the plane aboard amidst the hostile desert wind.

Avery had her angle of attack dialed in and was riding the wind slightly to the right of the ship’s wake. She stole a glance at her landing-gear indicators; they confirmed all three were down and locked. She had peeled back her goggles in order to distinguish between the red, green and orange lights of the ship’s optical carrier landing aide, an array of lights known simply as the “meatball.” If the pilot saw green lights, it meant the approach was too high and that touchdown would be long, missing the ship’s arresting cables. Red lights meant the pilot’s approach was too low and that a crash into the end of the ship was likely. Orange lights meant you were at the proper angle of attack.

The last 30 seconds before touchdown went badly. The meatball’s colors changed like lights in a disco: red, orange, red, green, orange, green, red, red, red, red. She fought to keep the plane on course, the wind interfering constantly, and then suddenly the meatball began flashing: She had been waved off.

“Damn it!”

She switched to full power and aborted the descent and quickly rejoined the landing traffic pattern. Modern jets were great for getting you out of trouble, she thought. You could just jam the throttle forward and the jet would climb right back for another approach. But all that power came at a tremendous cost, of course, in the form of fuel—something that was now starting to concern her.

Avery called out her fuel load as she approached again; the landing signals officer knew her fuel situation and wanted to give her all the room she needed. This time, she made it to the deck, but did what aviators call a “bolter”: Her tail hook hit the deck and bounced over the four arresting cables—another miss. She had already begun to apply the throttle as she hit the deck, but when she missed the cables she went balls to the wall, and added a three-second squeeze on the afterburner for good measure.

On the third attempt, Avery finally brought the plane aboard.She had nailed the “3-wire,” dropping the tail hook between the second and third arresting cables, which was ideal, except that she was dangerously low on fuel. Her fuel was so low, in fact, that during her approach she had twice fingered the yellow-and-black-striped ejection handle that looped up between her legs, just to remind herself that the option was available.

Avery felt the familiar vibration through her seat meld with the distinctive whine of spooling twin Rolls Royce Turbofans, a sensation sufficient to tug her free from her reverie. There were voices in her headset, checks and confirmations, and then she heard the flight instructor say “Here we go,” and the shuttle training aircraft began rolling. Black lines painted on the runway soon ticked off under the nose of the aircraft like distinct seconds on a watch, and then the lines blurred into a solid black line just as the nose wheel lifted from runway one-seven.

Since the very beginning of the Space Shuttle Program, the White Sands Space Harbor (WSSH) in New Mexico had served as a backup landing facility for the shuttle. It was third in line, following the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Edwards Air Force Base in California. In 113 shuttle flights, however, only once had an orbiter landed at WSSH. It was Columbia, returning from NASA’s third shuttle mission, designated STS-3. And so it hardly seemed worth the trouble and expense to keep the two 15,000-foot hard-packed gypsum runways ready, annually recertified as they were for shuttle weight requirements, and groomed to a laser-leveled tolerance of plus or minus 1 inch per 1,000 feet of runway.

The facility served not only as an alternate landing site, but also was available for emergency landings—specifically the abort-once-around (AOA) landing that would be implemented if the main engines failed to take the