When the nose dropped again, she eased back on the stick and leveled off barely ten feet over the grassy butte as she waited for the violent shaking to subside. She kept her control inputs as smooth as possible, and when the shaking faded into only a mild tremor, she reached up to pull the lever and add one notch of flaps. She braced herself for the nose’s natural tendency to drop while wondering what the added stress would do to the damaged airplane. But she held together.
She pulled power and held her speed constant until she had assured herself the plane wouldn’t nose-dive for the ground. Then she cracked the power back even further.
“You need to put her down,” the helicopter pilot said. “Now.”
She rounded out the bottom of the approach profile, and the tremor grew until the plane shook with surprising intensity. She waggled her stick from side to side, dumping air and lift from under the wings until the tundra tires settled onto the dirt. Not knowing how badly her tailwheel was damaged, she kept it off the ground and tracked in a straight line, using gentle rudder pedal inputs to avoid the biggest shrubs dotting her path.
“Stop!” the voice screamed at her.
As her airspeed continued to decay, she retracted her flaps and let the tailwheel fall as her landing lights illuminated what looked like the end of the earth racing toward her. She stood on the brake pedals and held her breath as the experimental plane struggled to stop before she ran out of ground.
When the Carbon Cub came to rest at last, she felt the tension trapped in her body evaporate in an instant.
Jug leaned his helmet against the head box as he plugged in the afterburner and watched his airspeed tick upward in his Helmet Mounted Display. He added back pressure to his side stick, and the Joint Strike Fighter climbed rapidly through the thin coastal air.
“Devil One climbing into the three block,” he said over the datalink network, letting the test director back in China Lake know he was climbing to thirty thousand feet to begin the test.
“Copy,” the emotionless voice replied.
It felt strange being the only aircraft in the large Pacific missile test complex, but at least he had a host of engineers, technicians, and other test pilots monitoring his flight from the command center back in China Lake. If he needed a second or third set of eyes and ears, he would have his pick.
He pulled the engine out of afterburner and climbed effortlessly at three hundred and fifty knots. With a subtle twitch of his hand, the plane responded to his command and banked to the right as he steered to follow the pre-programmed route on his display.
A little over a minute later, he flew over the first fix on his route. “Devil One, checkpoint Alpha,” he said.
“Copy,” the same emotionless voice answered.
He adjusted his heading to the southwest on a route that took him just north of San Nicolas Island, where the Navy had a myriad of radar emitters that would attempt to detect him while he engaged target drones orbiting in a simulated CAP.
His radar warning receiver chirped, and Jug noted the line of bearing from the emitter, figuring it was one of the Navy’s longer-range systems. But so far, the ground-based system had not painted a return, and he was still piloting a phantom through the night sky. But he wasn’t willing to risk Project Rán’s success on chance, so he toggled over on the Panoramic Cockpit Display to the page for the AN/ASQ-239 electronic warfare suite.
The next-generation electronic warfare suite was always active and provided both offensive and defensive options to the pilot. But it was its all-aspect, broadband protection and suppression of enemy radars that Jug was most interested in. Even if a surveillance radar was able to paint a return against the radar-absorbent material baked into the skin of his jet, his EW system would jam it and create a blind spot for him to slip through. He grinned when he saw the system working as advertised.
“Devil One, buzzer on,” he said, letting the observers in the command center know he was jamming along a radar’s line of bearing.
“Copy, Devil One,” the observer said. “Palmdale, how’s the radar picture?”
The voice of their FAA representative broke in. “Picture clean.”
“Devil One, continue to checkpoint Bravo.”
“Roger,” Jug said.
He scaled out on his moving map display to see more of the route that turned north after San Nicolas and paralleled the Air Defense Identification Zone at the far western edge of the test complex. He knew he would engage the target drones on that leg before reversing course to the south to launch his Joint Strike Missiles at the target ship.
