DELTA BLUE
“Mach two-zero, jefe.”
“I’m still with you, Tiger” McKenna said, his eyes performing the automatic cockpit scan. The digital numbers reported the angle of attack at the correct forty degrees, so he figured that, once again, he’d let the computer play commander of the craft. As a pilot who had flown anything from Stearman bipes to F-16 Fighting Falcons and loved them all, the most difficult thing he had learned to do was to let some magic box of silicon take his job away from him.
He had relied on the computer almost four hundred times in this segment of the flight, and the computer had accomplished the leg correctly every time, adjusting controls and length of burn for any variance that cropped up. McKenna couldn’t help thinking that, given the chance, he would be just as accurate. He couldn’t help thinking, either, that if he was just slightly in error, it would be fatal.
The MakoShark prepared to enter the denser atmosphere facing forward and nose high just like her larger cousins, the Space Shuttle Orbiters.
“Altitude nine-zero,” the weapons system officer reported from the rear cockpit. Major Tony “Tiger” Munoz didn’t have to mention that the unit of measurement was miles. They had been flying together for so long, since Munoz had spent a year as a weapons system trainee in McKenna’s squadron, that certain procedures and expectations had become intuitive and automatic. Back then, McKenna and the feisty WSO in the backseat of his F-4D had taken second place in their class in the Red Flag combat exercises out of Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
McKenna felt the first drag of the thicker atmosphere pulling at the MakoShark. Two amber indicators in the lower left corner of the Head-Up Display, the HUD, confirmed that the computer had ordered coolant pumped through the heat shields, as well as the cockpit air conditioning level increased.
“Damned computer remembers everything,” he muttered over the interphone.
“What’s that, Snake Eyes?”
“Nothing, Tiger. I’m complimenting a box on a job well done.”
“Gettin’ bitter, are we, amigo? You seat-of-the-jeans people are too damned romantic. Can’t live with the demise of the Spad.”
“It died?” McKenna asked, forcing wonder into his voice.
“Couldn’t take the heat. Skin temp four-five-zero Fahrenheit. Leading edges comin’ up on seven-ought-ought”
“Copy that,” McKenna said, “coolant running.”
The leading edges of the wings and nose were composed of a second skin combining reinforced carbon-carbon, Nomex felt, and a ceramic alloy that resisted the temperatures that rose to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit on the leading edges of the wings. Additionally, the nose cone and the wing leading edges contained an arterial network of cooling tubes through which super-cooled fluids were pumped. McKenna thought the system was considerably better than that of the Space Shuttle’s individual tiles, and there had been relatively few failures, none of which were critical.
