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IT WAS THEIR LAST TRAINING sortie before the big show, and Woody felt like he and Kruger were finally starting to become a cohesive team. All he had to do was get to the merge with Spectre unobserved, get a quick simulated missile shot, and they’d be finished with training and on their way to North Korea. For whatever that was worth.
After the meeting in the vault, Spectre had come up with a solid game plan to get the most out of their last few training sorties. Kruger was paired permanently with Woody while Spectre alternated between Dusty and Cowboy, now acting as a mission critical pilot instead of just an instructor in the backseat.
For their final training sortie, Cowboy occupied the backseat of Spectre’s SU-30. They had started sixty miles away – at the edge of the designated restricted airspace – with a plan for Woody to intercept while Spectre and Cowboy assumed the role of an unaware bogey.
When both aircraft were set at their respective sides of the airspace, Spectre called “Fight’s On” and they turned toward each other. Woody and Kruger worked together to use the SU-30 Advanced Flanker’s Phazotron N010 Zhuk-27 Active Electronically Scanned Array Radar. Once they had the target and were in range, Kruger switched to tracking Spectre’s aircraft with the Infrared Search and Tracking System (IRST) to allow for passive tracking without exciting the Radar Warning Receiver (RWR) in Spectre’s aircraft.
At twenty miles, Woody turned hard right to start working the offset. It was a move to test awareness of the bogey and then to set the merge geometry. If the bogey pointed its nose at them, that would be evident on their display and would mean the bogey was looking for a fight. If Spectre and Cowboy continued on their current heading, it meant that they were unaware. In that case, the turn would also build space and angles so that Woody could end up at Spectre’s 9 o’clock low where it would be harder for them to see him as he made the visual identification up close and took the shot.
They weren’t sure intercepts were something the North Koreans would need to see as part of the demonstration, but Spectre wanted them to be prepared for anything. They needed to look and act the part of Russian demo pilots down to the smallest detail.
Woody was watching Spectre’s aircraft continue on its heading on his display when he heard Kruger say, “Oh shit!”
“Nah, brah, he’s unaware,” Woody said reactively as he looked out through his helmet mounted cueing system and found the circle over Spectre’s aircraft in the distance.
“No!” Kruger yelled over the intercom. “Bogey...err...Bandit... Fuck! There’s an asshole on our six!”
“What?” Woody asked as he looked over his shoulder and suddenly saw a giant gray jet rolling in on them.
Instinctively, Woody deployed a string of flares and ripped the throttles to idle as he started a hard break turn into his attacker.
“Woody!” Kruger protested under the G-forces.
Even at idle thrust, the SU-30 gave Woody everything he was asking for and more, almost instantaneously giving their unsuspecting attacker a face full of Woody’s aircraft.
The F-22 pilot that had intercepted them had misjudged the range and closure rate due to the size of the SU-30 and had given himself no path of escape as the spine of Woody’s aircraft filled his HUD. He tried to turn left and away from Woody but the closure was just too great and the two aircraft collided over the desert.
As the airspeed bled down and Woody continued the turn, he felt the impact from the F-22’s right wing clipping his left wing. The aircraft suddenly rolled violently and then started to spin.
“Uh oh,” Woody said as he struggled to regain control.
As he had been trained, Kruger started calling off altitudes as the world tumbled around them. “Fifteen thousand!”
Time seemed to stand still as Woody struggled to stop the spin and regain control. He had no idea what control surfaces even worked after the impact, but he was determined not to lose the aircraft.
“Twelve thousand!” Kruger yelled.
“Cobra One-Two, status?” Spectre asked over the radio as he and Cowboy noticed that Woody and Kruger were no longer maneuvering in relation to them.
“A little busy!” Woody managed to get out over the radio as he continued to fight the aircraft.
“Ten thousand!” Kruger warned. They were descending like a brick and had less than two thousand feet to go before reaching their designated “uncontrolled ejection altitude” below which it would be unsafe to punch out.
In a last-ditch effort, Woody split the throttles and put in a full boot of rudder. With one throttle in full afterburner and the other at idle combined with the rudders, he hoped to at least slow the spin and get the aircraft flying again.
“Nine thousand!”
“Woody?” Spectre asked over their radio frequency. “You guys okay?”
“Standby!” Woody yelled.
Woody’s plan started to work. The tumbling of brown and blue started to slow.
“Eight thousand! We gotta go!” Kruger said over the intercom.
“Negative! I got this!” Woody said.
“Seven thousand!” Kruger said.
“I got it!” Woody reassured him.
“Five thousand!”
The tumbling slowed to a wobble. Woody ripped the lone throttle to idle as they exited the spin and the ground rushed toward them.
“Four thousand!”
Woody tried to pull back on the stick, but as he did the aircraft tried to roll. He fought it with rudder and decreased his pull.
“Three thousand!” Kruger warned.
“She’s flyable. I got it!”
“Cobras knock it off, Cobra One-One knock it off,” Spectre called over the radio. “I’m heading to your position.
“Still busy!” Woody replied. He was fighting the jet as it continued to descend. They were still fifteen degrees nose low and pointed at the rocks beneath them. He tried to deploy the speedbrake but it only made the rolling motion worse.
“Two thousand!” Kruger warned.
“We’re recovering,” Woody replied calmly. He continued easing back on the stick as he managed the throttles and rudder to keep the wings level.
“Fifteen hundred,” Kruger said.
“We’re leveling off,” Woody said as the nose finally tracked through the horizon and he breathed a sigh of relief.
He looked over at his left wing. Half of it appeared to be missing and it was streaming a fluid.
“Woody, are you guys down at fifteen hundred?” Spectre asked.
Regaining his composure, Woody said, “Yeah, we just had a midair with a Raptor. Not sure what happened to him though.”
“He’s at our left, seven O’clock low,” Kruger said over the intercom.
Woody looked over his shoulder and saw the billowing smoke from the crash site. His stomach turned as he realized the Raptor had crashed. He only hoped the pilot flying had been able to make it out.
“I see it,” Woody said. He looked up and saw another Raptor orbiting above the site. “Looks like his wingman is overhead.”
Woody keyed up the radio. “Spectre, heads up, one of the Raptors crashed and his wingman is playing on-scene commander at ten thousand feet. I’d avoid the area.”
“I see him,” Spectre said. “And I’m visual with you at two miles. I’ll rejoin and we can get a battle damage check.”
“Cleared in,” Woody replied. “I’m putting home plate on the nose.”
Spectre moved to within a few feet of Woody’s aircraft. Starting on the right side he climbed up to check the top and then descended to cross underneath, slowly inspecting the damage until he reached the left side and climbed up once more. After he finished the check, he returned to Woody’s left wing.
“Looks like the tip of the left vertical stab is gone and at least a quarter of your wing. There’s hydraulic fluid and fuel streaming out of the wing but it doesn’t appear catastrophic, how’s the controllability?” Spectre asked.
“Shitty!” Woody replied. His leg was starting to get tired from the pressure on the rudder pedal.
“Let’s climb up and get a controllability check and see if we can get it configured,” Spectre said. “You may have to jettison the aircraft.”
“Not after all we went through!” Woody shot back. “This jet is going home.”
“We’ve got another jet, bub,” Kruger said from the backseat. “Just saying.”
“We’re twenty miles from the field,” Spectre said. “Let’s climb up to at least twelve thousand and configure.”
“Copy,” Woody replied as he slowly added power and raised the nose.
When they leveled off just above twelve thousand feet, Woody gave Spectre the visual signal that the landing gear was coming out. Spectre configured with him and the two aircraft lowered their landing gear. It was important that Spectre be in the same configuration to give Woody a reference for angle of attack and airspeed values of a normal aircraft.
As the gear lowered, the rolling tendency actually decreased slightly. “So far, so good,” he said over the radio.
He started slowing to the approach angle of attack. As the jet slowed below two-hundred knots, the rolling tendency grew more pronounced. At a hundred and seventy knots, the aircraft started to roll.
“Looks like no slower than one-eighty,” Woody said over the radio as he added power. He had taken the minimum controllable airspeed and added ten knots as a safety factor.
“Copy that,” Spectre said. “The field is one o’clock and twelve miles.”
“In sight,” Woody said. “In the descent now.”
Spectre moved to a chase position and followed Woody down. He chased the crippled aircraft down to fifty feet and leveled off as he watched the landing. Woody touched down fast but had no issues slowing down on the massive thirteen-thousand-foot runway.
Satisfied that Woody was safely on the ground, Spectre retracted the gear and entered the overhead pattern. He and Cowboy landed just as Woody’s aircraft was being towed back to the hangar, dripping fuel and hydraulic fluid.
“So, what does all this mean now?” Cowboy asked as they taxied in.
“We’re fucked,” Spectre replied solemnly. “Again.”