Author of Executive Order and Angels Share
“Center, it’s starting to get a little bumpy up here. Can 837 get a vector south?”
“837, we're trying to move some aircraft down there, but there’s a smaller cell building down by, uh, San Angelo. We’ll try to get you between ‘em. Stand by.”
“Good God! Two Storms!” thought Eric as he strained to look through to the northeast, thinking that he might see a tornado along the back edge of the big cell. But it was still too far off, and the plane was in the wrong position. He could just glimpse the trailing edge of the black boiling monster, and even made out the strobe-like flash of a lightning bolt, dulled by the thick clouds above it.
Then he, and everyone else on board, felt the aircraft drop slightly and shudder, rolling left to right, those beautiful flexible wings undulating, up and down, as though waving at the thunderhead.
--The Tin Pusher Chronicles, Part 1
The controller on local, the guy who had cleared the twin-engine jet to take off, asked the co-pilot to “say again,” and when he got no response, jammed his palm into the big red button on the console, scrambling the gargantuan trucks belonging to Airport Rescue and Fire Fighting.
If there was an upside to the disaster, it was that the aircraft was not an airliner, but a cargo jet, ferrying loads of mail around the Great Lakes and headed next to Indianapolis. The only fatalities were the pilot and co-pilot, who, the controllers all agreed, were shit-for-brains who deserved what they got.
--The Tin Pusher Chronicles, Part 2, Chapter 1
Freddy pulled the rear steering lines and she felt the false sensation of climbing (the somatogravic illusion). Then he pulled on the front strings and the two dropped, leaving Debbie's heart in her throat. For an instant, she was again frightened. But then came another soft, buoyant turn to the left followed by a pass to the right, and her fear was replaced with elation.
They rode an unseen zephyr and saw the lands of northern Illinois as few had done before. The irregular quilt of farm fields. Over there! the Fox River, with a pool of white below the diversion dam at Blakes. The serpentine asphalt of Highway 71, its toy cars and trucks gliding silently and slowly onward. The small town of Norway and its glistening little reservoir. The long rectangle of green that was the club's airstrip, where they would soon land.
No! Make it last longer!
--The Tin Pusher Chronicles, Part 5, Chapter 4
