Emily stood in the rear of the auditorium with Robert, stretching her arms above her head. “That was entertaining. What team is Mark referring to?” she asked, full knowing well it was her and Robert.
Robert turned around in front of his seat to ensure he didn’t leave anything. He turned back around, and Mark was there, sipping his fancy Starbucks.
“We are taking some leave… vacation, and will be back in two weeks,” Emily told Mark, smiling, and pulling his leg.
“Very funny. Let’s get back to our spaces. I’ve got to call out to Buckley… phone a friend,” Mark said. “Well. You can’t make this stuff up.”
Wu and Liu had completed the demo flight for the Generals, Admirals, and Communist Party leadership, and took the Devil Dragon outside the airport’s airspace to the north to perform some repositioning maneuvers for a line-up, then checklists before landing. Wu made some tight turns to the left and right, rolled inverted, then upright. Today’s flight test card was VIP centric, but also included aerodynamics and aerobatics, measuring stability and timing of specific flight performance maneuvers. Complete with the VIP Demo and test card, they slowed down the aircraft down to flap speed. If they were too fast, the flaps would rip off the aircraft, causing a catastrophic failure of the aircraft. The pilots always checked the airspeed, and shared that fact out loud with the other pilot for good aircrew coordination and communication.
“Good speed, flaps 50,” Wu ordered. God damn, I don’t feel good he’d said to himself, keeping the thought private as he went through the procedures.
Liu moved the flap lever, located between the two seats, and the flaps located on the wings moved down to the 50 percent position. The Devil Dragon slowed down considerably, attempted to pitch nose down due to the center of the pressure of the wing moving rearward, but still wanted to fly due to the extreme aerodynamic shape of the machine. She was tough to slow, as Wu realized in early on test flights, so he always gave himself extra space to get the speed burned off. Perhaps spoilers should be installed on the flaps to create more drag?
“Gear down,” Wu announced.
“Roger, gear down,” Liu repeated, but by accident, transmitted his voice out over the UHF radio frequency, externally. That meant his audio transmission, his words, left the aircraft and went over the radio waves and outside the aircraft. Most likely, no one heard it because it wasn’t on the airport control tower frequency. “Sorry, Wu. The intercom button and transmit button are too close to one another in here,” Liu explained.
It was a big deal, though. For a secret and stealth aircraft to transmit, by mistake, a radio call, meant they may have disclosed not only their position, but the fact that they even existed. Wu kept his concern quiet, but it was significant.
Liu moved the gear handle on the right side of the cockpit to the down position.
Wu made sure his seat harness was locked, brakes were pumped, and then… he saw it. The right, main landing gear safety light wasn’t illuminated. There should be three green lights, and they only had two illuminated, which meant they could not confirm all three wheels were down to land. One of them may be stuck in the up position. “Liu, take a look at that. The gear lights. The indicator light isn’t lit up, pointing with his index finger while keeping his hand on the throttle,” nodding his head.
“All right, let me take a peek,” Liu said, eyeing the light. Liu considered cycling the gear up and then down again, thinking it would trigger the down and locked position. If the light did not say it was down, they had a real problem on their hands.
“I’ll do a few circles out here before we come back inbound to the runway,” said Wu. “Radar is clear, so let’s troubleshoot.”
One of the newest avionics screens was their on-board radar that could detect other aircraft flying near them. The Devil Dragon actually had multiple radar systems that worked in tandem. One could detect threats using a low-frequency, long-range radar. The other was a higher frequency radar that was used to track threats, in addition to targeting data to intercept airborne and adversarial aircraft. Finally, there was a ground tracking radar for vehicles, and another for terrain avoidance for low-level missions.
Wu glanced over at the instruments, and could see another aircraft about 80 miles to their southeast and heading in their direction. The screen displayed the Hainan Airlines Boeing 737-84P, flight number HU7840. Wu thought it was impressive, as he could see their altitude at 32,000, ground speed of 419 knots, ground radar station F-ZLJQ1 tracking them, and the squawk code of 7073. Wu smiled that he didn’t have a squawk code, because they were invisible to radar.
Wu considered his landing gear options as he did left hand turns at 160 knots at about 1,800 feet, which took up a few miles of airspace. He did some hard thinking through the aircraft systems while keeping the bomber in the turn, and struggled with some constant pain in his lower back. Here, he was flight testing the flight capabilities of the new Devil Dragon stealth bomber for the very highest of Chinese Communist Party and military leadership, including Lieutenant General He Chen, but there was no one to call on the ground in this case to ask for help because the aircraft was so new. Wu was calm, but certainly did not like the situation.
“My head is down, checking the manual,” Liu announced, but it was over the frequency again. Wu was concentrating on the flying and how it would look to the VIPs over at the airport, so he wasn’t as concerned at the moment.
Wu considered a low pass again, but then Chen might see that his right, main gear was not down, spinning up an already emotional man for no reason. Wu was also unsettled because Lieutenant General Chen was, for lack of a better term, a complex leader, and that was putting it lightly. Any pilot in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force would be thrilled to achieve Chen’s level of military access, but should they aspire to lead like him? Chen was a leader in rank only, and everyone knew that his success relied heavily on the backs of others. Yeah, it was on my back Wu often thought.
“With your permission, I am going to cycle the gear, then go into the back and see if I can visually check that the gear is down, though, ahh… through the cockpit floor,” Liu said to Wu.
“Ok, do it,” Wu replied, “make it as fast as you can though, because General Chen is most likely wondering what the hell we are doing out here.”
Liu cycled the gear up, then down again. The light still did not come on. Liu then unstrapped out of his right seat, departed the cockpit, and then crawled slowly behind some of the hot electrical circuit breaker panels to peek around. On his hands and knees, slowly, and in very tight spaces, he looked through the light-weight composite carbon fiber work on the inside of the airframe, through the new microlattice open cellular polymer structure of the sidewalls and floor panels, and through the miles of electrical wires. Liu stretched his head down in to the cavern, and finally saw that the gear was not in the gear well, meaning it was in the down position where it should be.