Acme Professor Retired

The rate of climb was unbelievable, the strain on the wings and airframe was being recorded and sent to the ground station set up for these experimental flights, he watched them carefully represented on the large touchscreen in front of him. It was controlled by voice command, as generally you didn’t have a spare hand, when flying. He was circling quickly in the updraft trying to keep the plane in one piece.
The strain gauge graphs were in the red, but not quite in the purple, well most of the time.

He burst into the bright light at the higher regions of the cloud, he had grabbed the oxygen mask, during the insane ascent, and was on full oxygen as at this height, wow, these things can be 16,000 metres high,,, he was in the circulating updraft at almost 6,000 m! Yes that’s about 6 km high, insane, but gliders had been flown up to 15km, and they weren’t as strong or as tech filled as this one.

Ok 10,000 m, time to get out of this. He pulled out of the tight turn, and headed straight and level, looking for an exit from the clouds central spinning vortices, the lightning was becoming more frequent and here he was in his tiny stubby winged tin can, “Rocket Man” playing in his mind!

The flight avionics showed where he was on the map, he was far further away from the airfield than he had ever envisioned, bit he had height, boy did he have height, this was going to be fun.
Hold that thought! Because something always happens just when you think you have “The Tiger” by the tail, then on cue, he was struck by lightning. Well not him directly, that would have hurt like a ……!
“Heavy One”, took the hit as she was designed to, but to have this kind of hit in a rain soaked cumulonimbus at by now 13km high was never really in the scheme of things planned.

He lost everything, all controls all instruments, the whole shooting match went blank, and the acrid smell even got into his oxygen mask,“bloody hell” that was a hell of a hit!!

The plane was pretty much now just an aluminium coffin, delivering him, at great speed and not without some style, to an inglorious end, probably 20 metres into the earth, leaving nothing but “vaporised mushy” stuff and expensive goo splattered equipment, in a nice tidy little crater somewhere in the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands.

In the now dropping like a stone “vomit comet” he cooly assessed the situation, and did what we all do, when modern technology decides to crap out on us just when we need it the most.
The car keys fobs that fail to open the bloody door, just when you need it the most, with hands full of shopping and holding onto 2 x 5 year olds, and a dog, and the shopping…
The phone that decides all on its own to upgrade the software that you never asked for or for it to complete, when you are orbiting the furiously busy inner city one way systems, trying to find that restaurant your boss has told you to meet him/her at, and you are already 30 mins late!!

So he switched it all off coolly, while descending at an alarming rate.

The first equipment to come online was the altimeter speaker, giving a droning low sound, meaning, guess what? Yes you are descending…..! “Give me a break, I am all too aware of that! No Shit, Sherlock, thousands of euros worth of autonomous algorithmic assistance here and you decide to inform me I am descending”.

The screaming airflow over the canopy, and the fact the light was disappearing fast let him know in no uncertain terms the plane was hurtling earthwards.
After what seemed an eternity, where he got glimpses of the rapidly disappearing upwards inside walls of the cloud with more lighting flashes, the system came back on line, and he regained some of the flight surface controls, but the plane seems less than happy to be “assisting” as it seemed to be a bit overwhelmed at being reawakened and thrown into this “shit-storm”, to coin a phrase.