Academy Flight GT S14
Anlingdin Piloting Academy
In which Theo’s day is not great.
A mysterious aircraft pursued and shot down by four others. The urgency with which the Academy called on its own aircraft to get out of the sky suggests that they had some idea what was going on, and some reason to suppose that the four pursuing craft might not limit their attentions to the particular craft they were pursuing.
Theo manages a difficult landing in a sequence I feel probably deserves to be talked about, not just acknowledged, but I don’t have the whatever to appreciate it in detail.
Asu takes a while to notice what’s going on outside her own concerns, but at least when she does notice she seems suitably concerned and has some idea how to respond appropriately. (And the fact that she knows Theo’s tea preferences without needing to ask suggests that she does sometimes pay more attention to other people.) This is not to say that Chelly doesn’t want to help, but he seems like he might be under the kind of stress that hinders, rather than helps, efforts to think about what to do; I can relate.
I find it curious that a piloting course designed for those who plan to pilot spacecraft would begin with a glider, which involves air and gravity only, advances to a prop plane, and presumably next to the shuttle— which is still not truly spacecraft—and apparently never does include the piloting of an actual spacecraft, the kind that flies only between worlds and stations, and seldom or never lands.