The First Casualty

51

Colonel Wild Bill Hasty had a corner office, perhaps the only one in the building occupied by anyone below the rank of brigadier general. His was a suite of three second-story offices facing the threshold of Runway 01R, the right of two parallel runways with a compass heading of ten degrees, almost due north, where a pair of DC Air National Guard F-16s were shooting touch and goes.

The colonel was too busy collecting the data necessary for tomorrow’s flight to notice. He had already made certain his Jeppesen approach plates to both Cairo International and the military field, Cairo West, and his high altitude charts were current, both those in the loose-leaf binder and their electronic duplicates fed into the aircraft’s GPS electronic display system. The ones published by NOAA, the AJV-3s, were furnished free by the Air Force; but, like so many products, those by the privately published Jeppesen Sanderson Company were superior to those offered by the government. They were both more likely to be current, and certainly more detailed.

He had already called up the Global Operators Flight Information Resource website. This privately owned company was the one place all applicable SIGMETs, METARs, and NOTAMs could be found. Turbulence above 35,000 feet over the Philippines, runway repair on 07R at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, all in one place. There were none applicable to tomorrow’s flight.

Now he was calculating fuel burn based on the winds aloft. He frowned. The Air Force Weather Agency’s prediction varied by a good six knots from NOAA’s. The Boeing 747 had a potential range of 9,600 miles with all tanks topped off, but the destination was only 5,818 miles distant.

Rarely did the aircraft take off with full tanks. The weight of the unneeded Jet-A would only slow down the plane, burning yet more fuel. But a discrepancy of merely a few knots in wind speed could necessitate extra fuel. Conversely, the old pilot’s adage noted few things were more useless than fuel left in the pumps back at the base.

Hasty got up, crossing his office to where a small blackboard hung, his pre-flight to-do list. There were already two numbered items. He added: “3. Check current winds aloft.”

There were some parts of pre-flight planning that were best left to the last hour before takeoff, when he would file his international flight plan. His eyes went to a small frame on his desk where two lines of poetry reminded him,

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

Gang aft agley.

The eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns thought like a pilot.