Air Warriors by Douglas Waller

Author:Douglas Waller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

Jonathan brought his wings level at the top of the roller coaster moments before he was supposed to make the left turn for the run northwest into the target. It had to be a sharp left. Just banking the jet left at a 90 degree angle so its wings were perpendicular to the ground wouldn’t be enough. The jet would still swing too wide.

To make the sharp left turn, Jonathan had to perform what aviators called a “roll-in.” With his left hand he moved the throttle back to medium power and in the same instant shoved the stick smartly to the left with his right hand. With his left hand he pushed the power setting forward, then with his right pulled the stick back to his chest and even further to the left. That caused the plane to roll over almost upside down and the aircraft’s nose to swing around sharply to the left. Jonathan felt himself straining for an instant against his shoulder and lap belts as he hung suspended upside down in the jet.

In almost the same second, Jonathan remembered to toggle the master arm switch to ARM with his left hand, then to flip the transmitting switch on the throttle in order to radio to the rest of the formation: “Four’s in hot.”

Being inverted now also caused the jet’s nose to dive down to the target as the plane lost altitude. With the Goshawk’s nose now pointed at a 30 degree angle at the bull’s-eye target, Jonathan in the next instant quickly backhanded the stick to the right so the aircraft would roll back to being right side up. The entire maneuver—the roll-in along with arming the plane and radioing to the formation—took just over three seconds.

The jet’s wings wobbled up and down as Jonathan in the next breath struggled to line up the plane for the dive to the target. He squinted at the two-ringed bull’s-eye bouncing around on the heads-up display, the HUD, in front of him. In the center of the rings was a small dot. The pilots called this the “pipper.” Jonathan had precalibrated the heads-up display so that all he had to do was steer the plane toward the target and drop the bomb exactly when he saw the HUD’s pipper cross over the bull’s-eye on the ground. The bomb would land on the bull’s-eye. Simple enough, at least in theory.

But to make it actually happen, Jonathan now had to juggle more than a half dozen calculations in his head during the next eight seconds. Whether the bomb hit the bull’s-eye depended first on the altitude at which Jonathan released it. The higher the altitude, the more time the bomb had to fall—also the more time gravity had to bend the bomb’s trajectory further down. Therefore, if Jonathan released the bomb too high as he dove to the target, the bomb would fall short of the bull’s-eye. If he released at too low an altitude during the dive, the bomb would fall beyond the target.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.