//------------------------------// // Air Tour // Story: Destination Unknown // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// Destination Unknown Air Tour Admiral Biscuit It was inevitable as soon as she started chatting with pilots that Sweetsong was going to be invited to fly in an airplane. She’d never really sought that out; every pegasus said that they were uncomfortable, crowded, smelly, and completely separated from the air outside, invariably causing vertigo. Those few pegasi who served rescue operations typically rode on the outside of helicopters, or inside but the door was left part way open for the duration of the flight. Little airplanes were different, and it might be a fun experience. It might also get her a good view of how the land around Seattle was shaped, so she’d know what route to take by train.  One of the pilots had a Stearman Kaydet, which was a cheerful yellow, and even better had an open cockpit, so flying in it would be much like flying on her own, although with no real effort. The leather helmet the pilot offered her was uncomfortable and the earphones didn’t line up with her ears, but she needed to wear it so she could hear him talking—the wind and engine noise would make it impossible to be heard otherwise.  Once she was settled into her seat, the pilot strapped her in place and gave her brief instruction which mostly amounted to ‘don’t touch anything,’ and advised her to not bail out of the airplane and fly off on her own. He had apparently seen some of the documentary footage of the Pegasus Rescue Brigade in action—they jumped out of their helicopter when it was hovering. After the pilot completed his safety checks on the airplane and reminded her once again to not touch any of the controls unless he specifically told her to, the engine was started and they taxied around to the runway. While he was speaking to the control tower, she was tempted to cut in on the radio and give her own callsign, although since she wasn’t flying on her own, she wasn’t required to. Also, she couldn’t even remember what it was. The airport had two parallel runways, one for big airplanes and one for little airplanes. She’d seen the big ones flying overhead and approaching and departing from distant airfields before; she’d seen plenty of them on the ground, but being lined up at the threshold of their runway as a jet took off on the runway next to them was an entirely different experience, from the moment the lumbering giant’s engines screamed into takeoff thrust to it changing into a more graceful machine as it roared past their holding position. She watched as it rotated its nose up and then took flight, its wings flexing as they took on the whole load, and it was tucking its wheels into its belly as the blast from the engine and the vortexes from the wingtip washed across her, rocking their biplane on its landing gear. Sweetsong knew about wake turbulence, but had never actually felt it before, and she wondered if the pilot could feel it, too. Her hoof hovered over the transmit button, and then the tower was on the channel, reporting the turbulence and also giving them clearance to fly. Like the big airplane, the biplane was awkward on the ground, bouncing and rattling like a boxcar with a flat wheel, and she wasn’t fond of the loud buzzing that the engine made, either. Unfortunately, with her helmet on, she couldn’t pin her ears back. Once the tail lifted up, it started to get in its element, and the bounciness of the gear nearly vanished. She could feel the winds over the wings change as they started to provide lift, and then they were climbing, more sedately than the jet which had left before them. The pilot had to do a lot of talking to the airplane directors, and she was working out how the air flowed over the airplane—she had a vague idea of how it was supposed to work, but that wasn’t the same as feeling it for herself. The runway was nearly lined up with the railyard, and she glanced down at all the railcars lined up, as well as the lack of good cover anywhere around the yard—no convenient bridges, and only a tiny copse of trees between the railyard and the highway; looking behind her, the tracks skirted the airport perimeter. They turned as they flew over the island with the oil storage tanks on it, heading out over the sound. The Space Needle was off to her right, and she wondered if anybody in it was watching their airplane. ••• He flew all the way up to Sequim before turning around, pointing out locations on the ground for her to see. She’d also been paying attention to where railroads went—or where they didn’t. There were no rail bridges across Puget Sound, which meant she was going to have to go south before she could go west. The Sound had also held her interest—it was filled with all sorts of wildlife, seals and shorebirds, not to mention the shadow-shape of whales that would occasionally breach the surface and blow out a geyser of water before disappearing into the depths again. There were also nearly every type of watercraft imaginable, from lumbering cargo vessels to the more nimble fishing boats; pleasure boats of every size; she’d even seen a small cluster of kayakers crossing from Seattle to Bainbridge Island. Sailboats tacked in the wind, and tugboats and pilot boats ferried around their charges. The idea of bailing out of the airplane and flying the rest of the way to the Pacific on her own crossed her mind, but she’d left her saddlebags behind at the FBO, and she also couldn’t see the ocean from where they were. The pilot said it was another sixty or seventy miles west. Instead of flying over the sound on the way back, they flew over the Olympic Peninsula, a rugged tree-y land that reminded her of Skykomish. As they neared the Hood Canal, he offered her the chance to take the controls. She couldn’t reach the rudder pedals with her hooves, but could grip the control yoke with her forehooves and do gentle aileron turns. The airplane responded more slowly to control inputs than she did—admittedly, she was long past the point of having to think about what she was doing with her wings. Tempting though it was to abandon her seat and fly free, to show the pilot what she could do when unencumbered by an aircraft, she relinquished the controls as they crossed back over land and let him fly the remaining distance to the airfield on his own. ••• The FBO only had a vending machine for food, but South Town Pie delivered. They had a pizza called a unicorn which she had one slice of, and an artichoke pesto pizza which she ate entirely too much of, especially since after lunch she was pressed into doing an impromptu airshow outside the FBO. While she wasn’t on her best form and never had been that great a flier, she could make sharper turns than the biplane had, and could hover-hop from lamppost to lamppost, and she didn’t need much of the taxiway for her runup or landing. Sweetsong considered borrowing a radio long enough to get clearance across the runways to the Museum of Flight on the other side of the airport, but it was more sensible to ride in a car, even if it was miles around the bottom of the field instead of a short trip along a taxiway, across a runway, and then across another taxiway. ••• Most of the airport was surrounded by modern buildings, but right next to the museum was a red barn that was the original manufacturing location of Boeing airplanes. Her new pilot friend told her that it had been moved to the airport by a barge, and she wondered if that could actually be true, then thought about the airplanes going by on flatcars and decided that it probably was; a building on a barge was no stranger than Boeings on BNSF.  The museum had airplanes both inside and out—a propeller-driven Trans Canada airplane sat next to the parking lot, and a pair of sun-faded stubby-winged fighter jets sat in the corner. Their giant air intakes in their noses reminded her of wide-mouth fish ready to chomp down on prey. Inside, some of the airplanes were hung from the ceiling, as if they’d been somehow trapped in flight, while others either sat on the ground or on little pedestals. Some of them were meant to only be seen, while people were allowed in other ones. Flying indoors was not allowed, which was frustrating. Maybe the interiors of the airplanes hanging from the roof were missing, and the museum didn’t want anybody to know that they were just empty shells. They had a replica of Amelia Earhart's Electra. The sign told her that the original had been lost on a flight over the Pacific. Flying over oceans was dangerous; weather pegasi and rescue pegasi sometimes got lost over the ocean and never returned. A few firsts were also owned by the museum; the first presidential jet which she could walk in, the first flyable 747, the first jet airliner, and the first fighter airplane. That one had a strange bullet nose and its wings were held up with as much rigging as a sailing ship. She also got to see the inside of a Concorde, which was the world’s fastest and highest-flying passenger airplane, and the cockpit of a SR-71 which was the fastest production aircraft ever made. The rest of the airplane had been lost when it crashed. Besides the conventional airplanes, they had a few unconventional ones, including a flying car with detachable wings so it would fit on the road, a human-powered airplane called the Albatross, and the Alcor, a pressurized glider. Sweetsong liked the older airplanes, the ones that either had open cockpits or at least windows that opened. Humans seemed to prefer things that were faster and kept the outside out, but even as a mediocre flier, she knew it was better to be able to feel the air currents rather than be walled away from them, with no idea what the airplane was actually feeling besides what the instruments said. Pilots even needed a gauge to tell them if they were right-side-up or upside-down, something she’d never had trouble discerning when she flew. Still, as she’d looked at the prodigious size of the 747 and the 787, she couldn’t help but appreciate the sheer magnitude of them, nor the dramatic difference between the wood and canvas fighter airplane with its two-bladed propeller and the enormous maws of the 787s engines which could surely suck in that airplane, chew it up, and spit out nothing but splinters and scraps of canvas. She’d felt for herself what kind of winds an airplane left behind when it took off on a parallel runway; standing directly behind one of those engines would be akin to trying to stand in a hurricane. ••• She bade her new pilot friends farewell as the sun sank below the horizon. Several of them had offered her a place to stay for the night, but she’d turned down all their offers, preferring to spend the night outdoors. It had not been asked—nor could she have answered—what her favorite airplane was. She’d seen a few good overnighting spots from the airplane, and ultimately settled on the roof of a printing press building located near the confluence of two rail lines. It wasn’t the best location; the roof didn’t have a parapet and she could theoretically be seen by cars passing on a nearby highway bridge, but figured that as long as she stayed behind the roof-mounted air conditioning units, she’d be decently hidden. People rarely looked on roofs, anyway. The building had piles of pre-made tracks stacked up along its side, and all the chimneys smelled strongly of printing ink. The presses operating below her were a comforting noise, and the sounds of the railyard muted the swish of traffic passing over the yard on a long bridge. ••• Midway through the night, the rain started, and she eventually abandoned her roof for a dryer bridge abutment. A few sleepy pigeons fluffed themselves up then moved aside as she picked out her resting spot. ••• The rain kept up in the morning, and she reconsidered her idea to fly to the Space Needle. She’d wanted to buzz it just because she could, and that might get her more interest in the park, from people on the ground who saw it or people in the tower who spotted her on the way out. In the rain, though, there wouldn’t be any people in the park, and she was rarely allowed to sing for money indoors. A passenger train whisked by along the edge of the yard, sleek and streamlined, with nowhere for her to ride unless she bought a ticket and got on at a station.  A few minutes later, a container train rolled slowly under her bridge, and she eyed the rain-slicked cars, contemplating ducking down into the small open spot at the end of a container well. It was a bad idea; the cars were closely-watched, and the train was stopping in the yard anyway. Someday when it didn’t really matter, she’d ride on top of a railcar for as long as she could, sitting out in the open for anybody to see, as much as a challenge to the railroad as the pigeon who was strutting along the hem of her blanket was a challenge to her. Sweetsong sighed and stretched out her wings, sending the pigeon scurrying off. If I’m not going to fly in the rain, I might as well just turn in my wings and stay grounded forever. She rolled up her blanket and stuffed it into her saddlebags, looked up and down the tracks to make sure no trains were coming, and dropped off the abutment, heading north, flying above the tracks and searching for a restaurant. ••• She got briefly distracted by a collection of Coast Guard cutters tied up together—all of them had marked helipads on them, and she considered landing on them just for fun, decided against it, and then started flying along a street that had two stadiums on it, figuring that there would be restaurants near stadiums. There were, but most of them were closed, pubs and restaurants that catered to the evening crowd. However, a few blocks north she found the Biscuit Bitch which was open and offering breakfast. Their gritty scrambled cheesy bitch was a perfect breakfast for a rainy day, although a little too much to eat before flying. There was a bus stop right across the street; she could be lazy, spend a few coins, and ride a bus. Instead, she trotted down the rain-slicked sidewalk in the direction of the Space Needle which she still couldn’t see, but she’d been told if she went east on Stewart Street until she found the monorail tracks, she could follow those. By the time she found the monorail tracks, her breakfast was sitting comfortably and she took flight again, paralleling the monorail’s route. Trying to race it was dumb, she already knew it went faster than she could fly, but when she heard it behind her she picked up speed anyway, then rocked on her wings as it went past. Attempting to chase it would gain her nothing, so she slowed back down and continued her flight.