Hurricane
Admiral Biscuit
The parking lot of the Marsh Trail wasn’t exactly an airport, but then Sunshower wasn’t exactly an airplane.
She made one final check of her equipment. A Mark III flight suit, complete with nav lights and embedded ADS-B. Her instrument pack, securely strapped on between her wings. Flight helmet, GoPro, airplane radio, watch, backup altimeter, EPRIB, flight goggles. Everything she needed and a few things that felt insulting to carry but human regulations required them.
Her Camelbak was full, although she doubted she’d be wanting any water from it. The clouds above would give her plenty.
When she went to open the door, it tore out of her grasp and slammed against its stop. Rain and wind-driven grit immediately started tornadoing inside the car.
“You’re crazy,” her Uber driver shouted over the scream of the wind.
“Somepony’s gotta do it,” she shouted back. “Thanks for the ride.”
She stepped out of the car and studied the angry clouds above, the stunted trees and bushes and tall grass whipping around in the hurricane-driven frenzy, and nodded.
One last check of her equipment. Her navigation watch was programmed—she’d been studying the storm track and had three airports in mind as possible landing points. Probably wouldn’t land at any of them; anyplace was as good as anyplace else, but it was nice to have something to aim for.
She tapped the GoPro to make it start filming, flared her wings, and let the wind carry her up. Her Uber driver filmed her on his cell phone, at least until she disappeared into the sheeting rain.
[SOFT BREAK]
Half the idea had occurred to Sunshower as she was touring the space museum in Cape Canaveral. Posters on the wall explained how spacecraft could use the gravity around planets or moons to either accelerate or brake themselves. She’d done the same with a tornado once, achieving a flight speed she never could have accomplished on her own, so she understood the principle.
Early in the year, she hadn’t known about hurricanes. She’d done plenty of routine weather patrols in thunderstorms, getting a feel for how the Earth weather was different than what she was used to. She’d gotten comfortable with her equipment, about talking to the airplane directors, about her responsibilities as an ornithopter.
She also knew that she wasn’t supposed to fly IFR without special permission, which she hadn’t gotten. Sometimes it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. The tornado team had been allowed to fly in tornadoes, and when you got down to it, what was a hurricane but a really big tornado? She’d get data that nopony else ever had, better data that the big stupid airplanes that sometimes flew into hurricanes.
Her plan was simple. Get into the southeast quadrant of the hurricane and let the wind do most of the work. She could angle through the eye, and then slingshot herself off the northwest quadrant.
For most of the hurricane season, they hadn’t really cooperated, but now there was a real monster churning up the west coast of Florida, a proper Category 5.
Sunshower had practiced with thunderstorms and tropical storms and let the wind do most of the work as she climbed up through the rain and into the storm proper. Nopony knew she was in the cloud, except for her Uber driver, but that was okay; the only thing she had to watch out for was a NOAA airplane. Those were big and loud and graceless, lumbering down the runway like a stampede of buffalo.
[SOFT BREAK]
She’d seen the moving maps that humans had and it would have been nice to be carrying one along with her. Her cell phone had a moving map and it wasn’t too heavy but she was already wearing more than enough equipment and had decided to leave it behind. She had no idea when the storm winds took her out over Gullivan Bay and then the Gulf of Mexico; she might have already been in the clouds or she might have been fighting her way up through the driving rain.
It didn’t matter. She was doing it, she was in a hurricane and nopony else had ever done that. Visibility was nonexistent; there was nothing but grey and driving rain and screaming winds and the rough bumps of the turbulent air which sometimes flipped her on her back if she didn’t anticipate it fast enough. She’d used her pilot’s watch to set some GPS waypoints—they were only approximate, since the storm was moving.
As long as she got close, she could feel the air currents and she’d know where to go, although it wasn’t as neat as the weather back home. Truth be told, she was extrapolating from theory and limited feral storm experience.
Whatever. The winds were more than enough to keep her aloft; even if it all went wrong, the hurricane should drive her around clockwise and dump her back on land if it continued its track up towards Tampa. The predictions the humans had given and the ones she’d made herself in her weather notebook gave a high probability of the storm hugging the coast on its east side, while the west would be largely over the Gulf.
She glanced down at the glowing face of her pilot’s watch. It gave her cardinal directions as well as a bearing to the airports she’d programmed in, and that could always be followed. Depending on how fast the hurricane moved and how quick she got through the eye, it might be faster to fly up into the panhandle rather than back to the peninsula, that was a decision for later.
Sunshower’s radio was silent, save for occasional bursts of static. That felt weird; usually there were plenty of chatty pilots on it. Of course, nopony was flying in a hurricane, so it made sense, but it still bothered her.
Tempting though it was to key the mic and announce her position, she didn’t. That felt too braggy, announcing that she was flying through a hurricane and they weren’t because their airplanes were too flimsy and would be tossed aside like a filly’s toys.
[SOFT BREAK]
Sunshower could feel the change in the winds as she neared the eye. She couldn’t quite put into words what it was, maybe a slackening of the rain, or a more orderly procession of the wind. Maybe just the featureless grey mist she’d been flying through becoming infinitesimally lighter, maybe a change of pressure.
Whatever it was, she reached the tipping point between feeling like something was different and then seeing what was undeniably blue sky among the chaotic clouds, and suddenly she was through.
Is the inside of a tornado like this, too? It was eerie how much the wind dropped off. She could see the wall of clouds all around her and a few stragglers in the center who’d either broken off the main storm or just gotten caught up in it, but for the most part it was clear for the entire width of the eye, a wide empty stormless space.
She circled around it, first following the storm’s currents and then going against them, easy in the bright air. For the first time since she’d opened the door on the Uber, she wasn’t at the mercy of the winds, and she glided across the opening, banking and turning as she neared the edge. The sun was warm and pleasant and while she didn’t have the endurance to glide in it forever it was obvious that if the storm had been overland, she could have spiraled down to an easy landing.
It was the first glimpse she’d gotten of the ocean below her, the normally placid water raging in the winds.
Tempting though it was to circle down and touch her hooves in the water, she’d fought for every meter of altitude she had, and didn’t want to have to do it again. Even if she could follow the eye and keep to clear skies, that was a lot of work, and she had to remember that she still needed to fly back out of the hurricane. The last prediction she’d seen before leaving the parking lot put the eye a few miles out to sea, but that could have changed; the storm might have turned and headed due west. Sunshower didn’t know how far it was across the Gulf of Mexico, but she did know that it was further than she could fly.
The clouds towered above her, their very tops almost unimaginably high. If she managed to catch a really good updraft she might be able to make her way up there; maybe she could use the cyclonic winds at the edge of the eyewall to her advantage but probably not.
That was a shame; sitting on the top of the hurricane and looking down would be an amazing view.
Sunshower had lost track of direction in her orbits of the eye, so she glanced down at her GPS watch then frowned as she noticed moisture under the glass cover. It was supposed to be water resistant.
She snorted. That was important data she’d have to pass on. All the equipment she was wearing had been the result of experimentation--now not only was she getting important weather data, but she was also getting important equipment data.
The watch grudgingly accepted her boops and she got a course that would direct her to Venice, with Sarasota [VERIFY] as an alternate if the wind blew faster than she expected.
Sunshower took a sip from her Camelbak and then curved into a full-width crossing of the eye to get her speed up and make sure she was established on course. Even though it was only at the end of her foreleg, there’d been spots on the other side where she could barely see it. Especially since the glowing numbers didn’t seem as bright any more.
She felt the air currents buffet her, curving and rising [VERIFY] as she caught the edge of the eyewall, and then she was in.
Somehow this felt worse than when she’d first flown into the storm. Did it intensify, or was it just because she’d gone from calm air and sunshine right into the maw of the storm?
The wind rocked her wings and she could feel herself rising and falling even though the driving, torrential rain. While the storm in general moved in a relatively predictable manner, inside it was pure chaos. She fought her way against a cold downdraft, an air current from above the top of the hurricane that had come through like a waterfall, coating the tips of her feathers in ice before she was out again into the marginally warmer air.
Her plan had been to constantly spiral out of the center, leveraging whatever favorable air currents she could to put her back on shore.
That plan relied on her knowing her bearing and distance to an airport on land. Any point would have worked, but her watch knew where airports were. She could program in waypoints, but rarely bothered, since it was easy enough to scroll through it and find out where the airports were, or if she didn’t know the callsign of one, she could always ask another airplane and it would tell her.
Sunshower looked down at her watch again. The display was really dim. The clouds didn’t feel that much thicker, so she pulled it closer to her face and bent her head down enough for get a better look. It didn’t make a difference.
No matter, so long as I keep spiraling out to the edge of it, I’ll see land and then I can fly direct.
[SOFT BREAK]
It was more than an hour later when the flaw in her plan started to make itself known. She’d been hit by more updrafts and downdrafts and was starting to get punchdrunk.
That, in and of itself, wasn’t a huge problem. She still had lots of endurance left, just had to remind herself to think carefully before committing to a course of action.
The second, more-concerning problem was that the hurricane was constantly moving and while its east side had been over land, it might not be any more.
Her watch had been her guidance on that, but it had finally flickered out completely.
If she came out with land on her wrong side, if she couldn’t find the moon or lights on shore--either of which might be obscured by clouds--she might find herself flying off on a wrong heading, flying out into the Gulf rather than back to land, and she already knew how that would end.
She needed an airplane director to give her bearings and tell her how she was doing, then she’d know where she was in the storm.
Sunshower thought back to her training--she knew how to contract other airplanes and the control towers; the question was whether this constituted an emergency or not?
One of her aids to navigation had failed, she did not know her position and while the radio had been silent regarding other air traffic--as she’d expected--if a hurricane patrol airplane was coming through she wouldn’t know where she was in relationship to it.
An EPIRB was strapped to her hind leg, and her instructor had told her time and time again to use it before she was really in trouble. She reached back and tripped the manual trigger, then picked up her radio. Luckily she’d set it to the Tampa frequency before her watch quit on her.
Sunshower keyed the mic and began to speak.
[SOFT BREAK]
<FIX HEADINGS!>
It was a slow night at the Tampa Bay ATC. Hurricane [NAME] was slamming Florida’s west coast, bad enough that all normal traffic had been canceled in preparation. The last commercial flight had left an hour ago, followed by a few commercial jets that flew out empty to a safer harbor.
Evacuation plans were in place for the tower, too. For now, there was a skeleton crew of two left—when they were gone, all traffic would be handed over to Jacksonville and Tampa would be dark, at least until the hurricane passed.
Earl stood at the window, watching the storm roll in. It wasn’t his first hurricane, and it probably wouldn’t be his last. He had a few more years left until retirement. The towering clouds made him nervous, but the empty airport gave him a deep feel of unease. There were no airplanes, no baggage tugs zipping around, even the elevated trains to the terminals had stopped and gone back into their sheds. Not unlike an empty port, when he thought about it. The Navy put all their boats out to sea when a hurricane threatened a base.
“Doubt we’ll be here much longer,” he said. “Not unless the hurricane turns, and I don’t see that happening.”
Justin looked up from the radar displays. “We gonna shut these down before we leave? Because I don’t even know how to do that.”
“Leave ‘em up, if the tower blows over it’ll be the least of anybody’s concern.”
“Weird that I’ve got nothing on radar. It’s a creepy feeling.”
“Greeks had a word for that: kenopsia.”
Justin snorted. “I didn’t know you were an educated man.”
“Heard it in a YouTube video,” Earl said. “It refers to a busy place that’s now empty. Stick around on in Florida, you’ll see it again.” He paused and turned towards the radar display. “You’ve got it set on the closest range.”
“Yeah . . . I’ve never seen an empty radar screen before. Last plane left our control zone five minutes ago, an overflight from the Bahamas on its way to Atlanta.” He toggled a switch on his console. “Huh, that’s weird.”
“Last time the radar was completely empty was nine-eleven, you’d have been too young to see it.”
Justin shook his head. “I’ve seen video clips of it. Hey, I’ve actually got an aircraft on screen, right down in the southern sector, over the Gulf. Wonder what he’s doing?”
“Maybe one of the hurricane hunters?” Earl gave up his post by the window and started walking across the tower. “They usually radio us, but if they thought the tower would be closed by now, they might—”
He never finished his thought, because at that moment a radio which had remained silent for nearly an hour suddenly burst to life.
“Mayday-mayday-mayday Pegasus 27. I’ve lost my flight instruments and need vectors to Venice.”
“She’s in the hurricane,” Justin said. “Roger Pegasus 27.”
“I’ve triggered my EPRIB if you can monitor that.”
“Roger.”
Earl dropped into the seat next to Justin and grabbed a headset.
They couldn’t receive EPRIB broadcasts, but the Coast Guard could. It wasn’t all that useful for providing directions, since it didn’t update frequently enough, but it would give her position if rescue were required.
If rescue could even be attempted.
“How much equipment is she carrying, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Justin reached for the mic and then tapped his fingers on the table instead. “Some kind of navigation instruments, I don’t know what else they have to carry.” He picked the mic up. “Pegasus 27, are you able to follow a heading?”
“Not exactly, I lost my GPS and compass.”
“Pegasus 27, can you follow a VOR approach?”
“Negative, I don’t have the instruments to do so.” She held the mic on long enough for both the controllers to hear the blasting wind and driving rain.
“Rodger, Pegasus 27 you are on an approximated heading of forty degrees, you need to come to the right to about ninety degrees if you are able.”
The two of them waited as the silence stretched on. “She can land off-field,” Earl said. “So long as she can get over the ground. I’ll call the Coasties and see if there’s anything they can do.”
[SOFT BREAK]
“Pegasus 27, do you need an approach vector to Venice?”
“Uh . . . Pegasus 27, negative. I don’t specifically need the airport, either.” She could land wherever she wanted to. “Is there any land closer?” She didn’t think there was.
“You’ll pass over some keys, depending on where you make landfall. I don’t know the ocean conditions but they are probably not safe to land on.”
She knew the keys. Mostly shallow rises of land dumped where the ocean waves had dropped sand, and some of them were built-on. In a hurricane they’d most likely be completely awash; she’d never factored them into her plan.
“Pegasus 27, if you still want Venice, your current heading is one three five, you need to come back around to one twenty.”
I think I’ve passed into the northeast quadrant. She could feel the general force of the wind against her, and set an approximate course by that.
The bad news was that the northeast quadrant was the worst one, that was the one that had the heaviest rain and was the most likely to spawn tornadoes.
Her wings were sore and her goggles were fogging up. Not that the goggles mattered much; there was hardly anything to see.
“How far am I from the coast?”
“About nine miles.”
Sunshower pushed the stiffness to the back of her mind. Nine miles was a long ways, especially in a storm, but she could let the wind do some of the work for her. She’d gotten a better image of where the storm was and what she had to do to get back to land.
[SOFT BREAK]
“Coast Guard won’t launch any assets,” Earl reported. “Not until the hurricane’s passed, and then only if she’s still reporting on the radio, they’ve got other priorities. Not much chance if she goes down in the water.”
“What kind of lights does the airport have? I don’t want to have her change frequencies if she’s gotta click them on.”
“It’ll be a moot point; doubt they’ll have power at all. But I’ll check into it. Maybe we can get a fire truck out on the runway or something.”
The two men flinched as a gust of wind rocked the control tower. To the north, the skies were still clear—eerily so. South of them, the towering clouds were almost on top of them, dark and menacing.
Justin turned his head away from the window and back towards the radar screen, willing her little blip along.
“Just so you know, the airport’s officially closed,” Earl said. “We can hand this off to Jacksonville.”
“I heard the call. I’m not leaving.” He picked up the mic. “Pegasus 27, you’re drifting north, can you come around to about one fifteen?”
The radio was silent. Justin kept his eyes glued to the screen, watching the extremely slow progress of her blip—what if her radio quit, too?
He winced as the first raindrops gusted into the tower windows. A promise of what was to come. “We’ve got backup generators, right?”
“Yeah.” Earl started rummaging around in drawers, finally pulling out a hand-held radio. “Just in case.”
“Pegasus 27, you’re drifting north, can you come around to about one-fifteen?”
Silence.
But her course was changing; her track had moved ever so slightly north.
“She might not be able to transmit,” Earl said.
A burst of static on the radio got their hopes up, then it fell silent again. On the display, her altitude, which had been fairly steady, started dropping. Two thousand, fifteen hundred, one thousand.
Earl slumped in his seat. Thirty years had brought more crashes than he cared to remember. Sometimes he’d seen them from the tower, the airplane falling from the sky like a wounded bird, or splattering across the runway in a fury of smoke and flames, and sometimes it had been only an image on the radar screen, an aircraft which he never saw other than a phosphor glow and a voice on the radio.
“Pegasus 27, course one fifteen, radio when able.”
Was this Justin’s first? Did it matter? It was hard every time. Earl sighed. It was like CPR, you didn’t give up until someone else took over or until you collapsed over the victim. Years ago, he’d watched the YouTube video of the air traffic controllers guiding Sully’s flight. The controller had done a damn fine job, even if the commenters didn’t understand. Keep providing directions until all hope was lost. Maybe the falling altitude was the result of her transponder being torn off, she might still be in flight.
He winced as the tower rocked with a strong blast of wind, and then rain slammed like buckshot into the windows. The hurricane was upon them.
And she’d been flying in it. No. She was flying in it.
Earl snatched the telephone out of its cradle and punched a number from memory. It rang twice before there was a confused ‘hello?’
“Hey, it’s Earl. I’m in the Tampa control tower, you’ve got an emergency aircraft headed for your field right now. Get every light you can on that runway.”
“I . . . in a hurricane?”
“Light that thing up like a Christmas tree. She’s eight miles out, we’re giving vectors.” He glanced over at the radar screen. He couldn’t read her exact altitude from here, but he could see it was only two digits. “And say a prayer.”
[SOFT BREAK]
Well, that was bad. Sunshower had been so focused on complying with the new heading that she hadn’t noticed the downdraft she’d flown into until she’d lost most of her altitude, and then there was nothing more to do but guess which the best way out of it was.
The rain had really intensified, she could barely see her own muzzle. She’d lifted her hoof to reply to the last radio call and suddenly spotted that her altimeter was way less than it should be and dropping fast. Aviate then communicate. If she was over land, she wouldn’t have even bothered with air traffic control; she could land wherever and ride out the storm.
Not so much in the ocean, but she almost made a crash-landing. She got low enough to get a mouthful of salt spray before she was out of the downdraft and started picking up speed.
Microburst. She could use that to her advantage, trade some of the surface winds for airspeed. Angle against the hurricane winds to get some free lift, it would totally screw up her course but that could be fixed later.
Her course—they’d radioed her with a new one and she hadn’t taken it, hadn’t even called back.
“Pegasus 27, sorry, I just hit a microburst.” Airplane directors assigned altitudes, too, she’d forgotten about that. Keeping an altitude was almost impossible in a storm, but that wasn’t an excuse. “I cannot maintain an altitude, I need . . . uh, block clearance.”
“Your airspace is clear, Pegasus 27. Repeat, there is no other air traffic in your area. Do you need a new vector?”
He sounded stressed out and she considered telling him that she didn’t need assistance any more. Could an airplane un-declare an emergency? All the vectors he’d given her put her in the northeast quadrant, and as long as she let the wind force her along, the hurricane would spit her out over land.
Probably.
It was nice to have a person in her ear reassuring her, especially since she had no wingpony and no visibility.
“Let me get more altitude, then I’ll get a course. What’s my position?”
“You’re about one mile south of Venice airport, and seven miles west. I can give you the GPS coordinates if those would be useful.”
“Negative, tower, my map blew away and my watch broke . . . what’s to the north of the airport?”
She flew on as the tower looked it up. Sunshower didn’t like airplane maps and approach plates; they had some useful information on them but they pretended like there was nothing around the airport except a flat plane punctuated by a few marked hazards.
In the case of Venice, that was true in one direction, she supposed. Unless there were a really tall boat over the Gulf, landing from that direction would always be clear.
“The city of Venice,” the tower reported. “Which may or may not have streetlights on. There are no barrier islands; if you see land and a suitable landing spot.”
“I don’t want to put anypony out. What runways are there at Venice again?”
“Oh-five, thirteen, twenty-tree, and thirty-one. You’ve got clearance on any of them.”
The wind would be taking her to the south-southeast, and that was nearly in line with runway thirteen. That was the best one to navigate to.
Whether or not she’d actually be able to find it and land there remained to be seen. With her watch, it would have been easy; without it she was flying blind.
If the approach lights were working, she might see them when she got close. Some airports had approach lights that drew a path to the runway, as well as PAPI lights that were easy to see on the approach.
She hadn’t really studied the approach plates all that much.
[SOFT BREAK]
Neither Justin nor Earl was going to jinx the improbable flight by saying ‘I think she’s going to make it.’ They were both thinking it as the sole aircraft on their radar screen closed in on the coast. Her ground speed had been picking up as she’d altered course southward, aided by hurricane winds driving her along.
“I wonder what her ideal landing speed is?” Both air traffic controllers knew what different types of aircraft that landed in Tampa needed; neither of them had any ideas as to how fast a pegasus would land.
“I hope she knows. Didn’t she say the only instrument she still has working is an altimeter?”
“Yeah. She’s gonna be well below minimums going into Venice.” Justin twirled a pen in his fingers. “You think she’s going to need a weather report?”
“Wouldn’t be accurate, but pull up the METAR anyway.”
Justin did, and raised an eyebrow at the data on the screen. “Pegasus 27, you are about one mile from the runway, maintain a heading of one three zero. Caution trees eleven hundred feet from end of runway. Heavy rain and winds gusting to 110 knots, visibility less than a quarter mile.”
“Pegasus 27 thank you. Airport is not in sight.”
“You have clearance for runway one three or any other runway at your discretion . . . or anywhere on the field you require.”
“Pegasus 27, does Venice have PAPI lights?”
“Four light PAPI on the left side of the runway. Latest report from the airport is all runway lights are on for all runways.”
[SOFT BREAK]
Sunshower didn’t have to land at the airport, but she’d made it this far and wanted to at least try and hit a runway. She wasn’t so prideful to do anything stupid; if she didn’t see the airport, she’d land wherever she could.
It felt like it had been forever since she’d first had to radio for help, and yet the last mile passed in almost an instant. She’d found a spot in the hurricane that pointed almost exactly to the approach end of the runway and was hurtling over the ground at an insane pace.
She was low enough to see the beach as she crossed over it, and she could see a small smattering of lights in front of her, cars and houses that still had power.
Two blocks of houses passed under her in a blur. There was too much wind to risk landing at them. She could see broken limbs scattered on lawns and across roads, and then she passed over a clearing and got her first sight of the airport.
All four PAPI lights were showing red--she was below an airplane’s glideslope. Didn’t matter. The end lights were flashing, and a string of runway lights disappeared off into the fog.
“Pegasus 27, runway in sight, attempting landing now.”
She heard the airplane director respond, but not what he said--her focus was on nothing but the runway. She was going to come in fast and she’d have to figure out a way to dump speed right before she touched down or else she was either going to tumble or burn through a newish set of horseshoes.
Wish I had roller skates.
She skimmed across the displaced threshold a dozen feet above the runway, focused on the wide white strips where the airplanes were supposed to land, and started beating her wings backwards, fighting the wind in an attempt to get her airspeed down, but it wasn’t going to happen. The wind was just too strong to make landing on a runway possible.
Not to mention, there was no shelter whatsoever once she’d landed.
Sunshower considered her options as she overflew the runway intersection. Off to her right she could see a golf course and it had some trees that might provide a windblock.
She angled off the runway and flew towards the golf course, climbing just enough to get over the airport boundary fence. The wind wasn’t doing her any favors; she saw one hole that would have been a perfect landing spot but the wind blew her sideways and she had to pick an alternate in a hurry.
A trio of sand traps pointed to another hole that curved between two rows of trees, wide enough to give her some wiggle room, and long enough to bleed off airspeed in cleaner air.
She dropped down to treetop-level and then below, her hooves skimming over the short-cropped grass as she once again tried to scrub off airspeed. That had been a stupid thing to overlook, she shouldn’t have focused on an airport and instead had the control tower give her vectors clear of the hurricane.
The hurricane was funneling winds down behind her, and even when she’d gotten her speed down as much as she could, it was still faster than she wanted to risk. Trees were rushing up ahead of her, and just as she was about to start climbing, she saw an opening to her right.
This hole was perpendicular to the wind, and she’d shed enough airspeed to make the turn. After that she was home free; she stayed close to the cluster of trees and let them stop the wind. Now she could focus on a nice, safe landing. She extended her hooves and flared, touching down in a somewhat protected alcove.
It didn’t do much to stop the torrential rain, and she didn’t like how much the trees were whipping around above her head, but she was safe for now.
[SOFT BREAK]
“Pegasus 27 has landed.”
Both Justin and Earl let out a whoop and gave each other high fives.
“Im at a golf course south of the airport . . . I couldn’t land on the runways, sorry guys.”
“It’s fine, it doesn’t matter,” Justin assured her. “Are you okay? Do you need medical assistance?”
“I’m fine. Wings are sore, that’s all. I think I’ll hunker up under a tree until things calm down.”
“Roger. If you need any more assistance, you can contact Jacksonville Tower at one eighteen point three. Can you switch off your EPIRB?”
“Yes. . . . done.”
“We are evacuating the tower at this time.”
Earl clapped Justin on the shoulder, and the two men walked out of the tower.
THE END