Acme Professor Retired

“Heavy One”, eventually stopped its spinning plummet down to the great abyss. The airspeed indicator registered only briefly 319 knots, which he took just a minute to absorb, holy crap, lets get us levelled out a bit, he was reluctant to throw out the large airbrakes, as the stresses might have ripped the wings off.

Ah, yes speed down to 250k, and dropping. Altimeter not “Thrumbing” that deep descending noise as frustratingly noisily as before… 5000m on the clock… wow, almost 10k in 60 seconds… that’s 600 kmph over 300 knots, his mental arithmetic was good, but without his navigational equipment on line, he better find out where he is soon, as unfortunately the one thing this aircraft was not designed for was …staying up!

He shot out of the heavy black soaking wet cloud, into bright daylight, the canopy darkened automatically as it was supposed to.. “Well at least that’s working, now where, the hell, am I?”

The years of flying out of the club and all his recent training flights meant he pretty much recognised that he was traveling in “WAY!” the wrong direction, he pulled a quick 180 degrees, just in time for the navigation to come online. “Typical, NOW you join the party?”

So he was a long way from the airfield, bit the nav was now on line and gave him good odds at getting home, with his present speed and altitude, but that cloud was in the way of course and heading directly over the airfield.
Options??

There weren’t really any, the plane was designed to land at an airfield, not a farmers field, it landed with “too much speed” you would need a big flat field of grass, mmm? Guess what that’s called?… It’s called an airfield!

“Ok! we are going in” decision was made, and he hoped that he could spear through the could, manage to keep everything together, and hit the ground… mmmm not the best descriptive phrase? He planned on landing before the worst of the storm cloud, blasted the airfield, and in one piece.

At 4500m up, he had a bit of speed in hand, so he used it, he dived until he was at 200 knots and dove straight into the black ominous cloud.

Again he was hit by that massive up-draught, but he pushed the nose down and bucked and bounced his way, trying to stay on course to his destination.

BANG! “Shit!!!”

Another lightning strike, but this time not everything was offline, he still had some control. The plane punctured the side of the cloud, at a crazy angle, on its side with him, fighting to get the nose around and the wings level, with hardly any assistance, but it was responding, that was something, he didn’t see any value in deploying the parachute system at these speeds, and this close to those vicious up draughts, it would be in all probability the first deployed parachute in history, that went up, into that powerful vortex, instead of gliding tranquilly down to earth.

So he was now fully committed to getting the thing onto the ground, hopefully at the airfield…

The radio, suddenly spat out “Fucking Hell, Proff!”