To be a pilot, not just the Saturday morning kind, but a guy who goes out there and pushes the envelope and tries to make the machine do things it wasn't supposed to, means having something in you that says, "Fuck it. Let's do it."
Getting into an airplane with a stranger ranks right up there with accepting rides from creepers with vans and eating strange candy from the dude down the street who still lives with his mother and watches you through the window.
Even worse, it's not like therapy can help you deal with the kind of fatal trauma you get when you're killed in a crash.
I knew the sky was my destiny when my mouth said, "Yes," before my brain even processed the information.
Mr. Sterner, that was his name, was breaking all kinds of rules when he casually asked me if I wanted to take flight in his plane.
Sterner couldn't have cared less. He'd flown sorties in Vietnam, trained pilots in the Navy then left the service to go run an insurance business with his brother.
He could give zero fucks what anybody told him was right or wrong.
In a split second he'd sized me up and decided that I was okay — that I wasn't going to go run my mouth off about the crazy guy at the airport that took me up in his airplane.
He treated me like an adult when he asked me if I wanted to fly.
Ten minutes after take-off he leaned back and folded his hands behind his head and told me to take the controls, just like that.
Where I'd been trusting him not to kill me in the air or try to grab my dick, he just sat back and said, "She's yours now," putting his life in my hands.
That was the first time I felt like a pilot. That was the first time I was a pilot.
I was nervous and scared, but that was just a small dull roar, like the sound of the shower running in another room. Yeah, I was aware of my anxiety, but it didn't affect me one bit.
I knew all the gauges and levers and switches from my simulators. But I didn't know the gut rolling feeling when you changed your pitch or brought the plane into a steep curve.
Where others feel motion sickness, for me it was like finding out I had a new sense.
I wasn't a pilot just because I had the balls or the stupidity to say "Yes." I was a pilot because in that moment it felt right.
Once a month I'd go fly with Sterner. Afterwards he'd buy me lunch and tell me stories about flying inches over jungle tops, scraping the trees, landing on carriers and crazy stories about his fellow pilots and trainees.
The week after I got accepted into college he died of prostate cancer. At the funeral reception his brother pulled me aside and handed me a cardboard box.
Inside was the windbreaker I met him in and a plastic display containing his Top Gun flight school cap.
The message was clear; wearing the hat was reserved for the men that actually went through that program. But taking care of Sterner's hat was being entrusted to me, his final student — a kid who never had a chance to set foot on a carrier as a pilot — but eagerly dropped his bike on the sidewalk and climbed the fence to ride shotgun with a crazy old man with a death wish.
"Save a beer for me, Sterner," I say, getting ready to hit the parachute release.
15
Drogue
As the atmosphere slams into the Unicorn, attempting to vibrate me into a jelly coating on the floor and walls of the cabin, I watch my velocity, and get ready to release the small drogue chute designed to help slow me down to a less ridiculous speed.
Astronauts who have been onboard Soyuz and the Unicorn say there's no comparison. When working properly, and not doing what I'm doing, the Unicorn is a much smoother ride down on its retro rockets. While the Soyuz is a controlled crash, that despite two parachutes and a last-second retro rocket assist, manages to hit the ground at twenty miles an hour or more and then bounce back into the air — tricking first-timers into thinking they were on Earth. Nope, they get to relive the impact again a few seconds later.
Despite the first ever Soyuz capsule launch — which after a drogue chute failure turned a heroic cosmonaut into a pancake where only his heel bone was recognizable — the craft, as terrifying as it is to ride — ended up having the best safety record of any manned spacecraft until the new generation of capsules came along.
Up until now, the Unicorn has a perfect safety record, which I'm about to ruin when I die because I'm doing everything you're not supposed to do.
I hit the drogue release and get slammed into my seat hard. I was already pulling close to 4 G's — which I was only able to cope with because of prior training and all the practice sessions I did in a mock-up cockpit with a lead-weighted suit that showed me what it's like to try to press a button when your arm weighs a hundred pounds.
With the release of the drogue, there's a shift in my center of gravity and the Unicorn not only vibrates like a mofo, it starts to fly around and spin like a piñata at a birthday party for hyperactive kids.
My display shows a stabilized image of Guanabara Bay below me as a bright blue pool. I focus on the serene waters while my brain starts to liquify.
The Unicorn gradually settles down a bit. Right now, if the voice on the phone is to be believed, Russian fighters, probably launched from Venezuela or Cuba, are plotting an intercept towards me based on what they think my altitude will be when I release the drogue and deploy the main parachute — bringing me to a more leisurely descent at around twenty miles an hour — instead of the two hundred I'm hitting right now.
Ha ha, suckers. Main parachutes are for losers.
Won't they be surprised when they see me fly past at ten times my expected velocity? Won't we all?
BANG! The Unicorn jostles when I detach the drogue. My body pushes against the seat harness as I hang in mid air like the Wile E. Coyote momentarily forgetting that gravity is a thing.
I'm back in free fall — a much slower free fall than when I hit the atmosphere. I'm going just a mere 170 miles an hour now and not the ludicrous 17,000 when I de-orbited.
Ever see what a Ferrari looks like after it crashes into a concrete wall at 170 miles an hour? A lot like a mural of what a Ferrari would look like it if crashed into a wall at 170 miles an hour.
Komarov, that's his name, Vladimir Komarov, the cosmonaut who got to be the first one to ride and die in a Soyuz — they say he knew it was doomed but went anyway, because refusing would have put Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space and a world hero, in the death seat.
And I'm doing this because? Right, some asshole with a voice disguiser says it's the only way to save my life.
My life… fuck… I watched Peterson die in front of me.
Compartmentalize, David. You have two minutes before you have to pull off the most stupid maneuver of your inevitably short life. Deal with their loss later. Stop yours now.
I put my left hand around the stick and get ready to squeeze the throttle while my right finger hovers near, but not over, the hatch release by my head.
The bay grows bigger and I can see individual crests and the long wakes of boats.
Are the people down there looking up in the sky at this missile shooting towards the water?
Hell, is this on the news? I hit the upper atmosphere long enough ago for this to be a breaking story. I doubt anyone other than the United States and Russia has figured out my trajectory well enough to narrow it down. So that means no news crews waiting to film my death. I think. Good thing, because mom had all her students watch my launch.
Well, I'm sure somebody on the beach with a telephoto lens shooting voyeuristic shots of girls in their string bikinis will manage to capture the end of my life. It won't be a total waste. He'll probably be able to sell the footage to a tabloid site within minutes. Good for him.