A flight alone

A flight alone

A flight into history

So far so good, take off had been smooth, far better than expected. The angle and rate of climb had been exactly as predicted and all the instruments were reading just what we wanted them to. So why did I have this uneasy feeling, this slight apprehension, and a worry that all is not as it seems. An old adage from the motor racing world is that if everything is under control, you are not going fast enough; add this to the notions of “sods” law, that what can go wrong, will go wrong; mix this with the military saying that when things are going right, it is the time to expect trouble. There are so many sayings usually buried away deep in the memory, but when you have this “gut” feeling then they come to the fore. I double checked all the data, even viewed the recorded information about the take-off, all looked fine. The extreme stealth systems and the construction of this craft, designed to keep me safe from the high energy radiation at extreme altitudes, means I have no radio communication with base, and it also means they cannot track me by radar or any other technique. I was alone traveling so fast and so high that I was almost into the Magnetosphere. My mission, and the intention of the billions of dollars spent to get me here, is to see if we can manipulates the magnetic fields in such a way that it influences condition on the earth’s surface. The obvious sensitivity of this mission was another factor in the radio silence.

I switched to the nuclear propulsion unit to maintain my speed and rate of climb, this was a critical point in the flight, but this also went well. I was following a pre-programmed route so far, but once into the zone called the magnetosheath I would have to start to work for my pay. In this zone the normal rules about magnetic fields disappear, the direction and strength of earth’s magnetic field become erratic, here the high-velocity solar wind particles participate in a dangerous dance with our natural magnetic forces. I was going to try to get control over this dance, to set the music so the forces involved dance to “our” tune. My craft, although a military hypersonic fighter in its basic design, did not carry conventional weapons. I had the ultimate in weapon level laser beams, and an ultra-top secret upgrade in electromagnetic pulse generation. If I used these at ground level I could take out all forms of communication, permanently, for an area of ten square miles. Any and all electronic gadgets would be melted into a sticky mess, no car would move, no rocket would be launched, and no aircraft continue in flight. This was the reason I had not been able to test fire the devices. I was many miles up, alone, without communication, and about to test fire a power that had never been tested before. You have to understand that once into this zone my views out of the cockpit were blanked out by the shielding mechanisms, I have the fly the bird on instruments alone at anything over six miles high and over 5000 miles per hour.

Not the most comfortable situation, but not the first time I had to face my own mortality. All the shielding was functioning correctly, the sensors in my body suit showed all OK The special version of a dash cam that was installed showed me a graphic that made the dancing lines of magnetic fields, like the flux lines that show up if you sprinkle iron fillings around a permanent magnet back in the school room; but infinitely more complex and shown in three dimensions. Sounds daft in the midst of all this high-tech weaponry but I shut my eyes counted to three before I triggered the EMP cannon. I had my eyes open the moment I pressed the trigger; the device was pre-set to only fire a 1 second burst. I instantly fired up the laser, the systems were automatically recording everything, all I had to do was land with the recordings in one piece, this being far more important than my being in one piece. At first glance nothing had happened, my sat nav showed no change, I reset the EMP cannon for a 5 second burst and tried again. It was like being in a car that drives straight into a wall , my “g” suit reacted far faster than I could, and saved me from being crushed by the impact. Every alarm in every bit of equipment started to flash red. I realised that although it felt like a crash stop, I was actually still flying extraordinarily fast, the slight problem was that I no longer had any control of how fast we were going or where we were heading. In these conditions the concepts of right way up and upside down no longer apply.

The cockpit should have been in darkness, with all systems out but I could still see, due to a pale blue light that seemed to be radiating out from my instrument panel. I gave myself 5 precious seconds to get my mind and breathing back to normal then tried to determine if I was heading down to earth or out into space, the self-repair systems built, at huge expense, into military aircraft, came to my rescue. I could tell I was still traveling so very fast but the “sat nav lines of flux” gadget, had gone crazy, all the lines were now straight. It looked as if I was flying down a tunnel similar to driving a car very fast through a traffic free road tunnel and seeing wall lights “passing” by. This was totally beyond understanding. At first, I assumed the instrument was damaged but everything else was back to normal, the only exception being that the random dancing lines of flux, were now organised into lines at regular distances apart and staying constant. I had been sent up to find what would happen if we deployed these sorts of EMP weapons this far up into the very outer edges of the atmosphere. If the system was correct, we could have a very profound effect on the localised field, but what difference would this make back on the surface of Earth? I needed to get down with all the instruments and data records intact, and the first step in achieving this was to find which direction I was going.

I blanked out the flux lines and focused on all the other instruments, I needed was to know how far above the surface I was. At this distance from the surface, an ordinary altimeter would be useless, but I had a scaled-up version, this measured distance in Earth radii at this level, then showed miles above earth then automatically switching to feet as we came down. I was in level flight; the systems came back up. I eased down towards earth taking care that the angle of decent was very shallow to lessen the heat of re-entry into denser atmosphere. This took two orbits of mother earth, and then I was able to return to relatively normal flight mode, the cockpit shields retracted, and I could see out, I was still so far up that I could see a huge section of Earth in a great curve, disappearing under my wings. I did a thorough instrument check and then I tried to see if I could see any damage, I could see most of the upper surface of the wings and all looked OK. I searched my auto-navigation to find the quickest way back to base, they knew they would have no radar or electronic warning of my approach and so they would keep the landing strip free and have guys with field glasses watching the skies. The decent was uneventful until I entered the flight path for landing, the landing gear did not function, not the first wheels up landing I had done, but in a hundred billion dollars’ worth of kit? I chose the grass rather that the concrete strip, it gave me the same amount of room, but I figured it had to be less abrasive to machine, and myself. I considered ejecting but This is not simple in experimental equipment, so decided to stay and ride to the end. So, one of the most adventurous and experiments flight in the history of humans came to a quite ignominious end. The data survived but all that information is classified military intelligence.