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Breathe, Falisha. Focus on the job.
A thousand pounds of fuel didn’t leave much leeway for even a missed approach. Not that it mattered. Gabe never missed a landing, nor did the rest of his flight. They were a very tight team—the top one aboard. They were the kind of flyers that could be tapped for the Blue Angels demonstration team, they were simply that good.
Rumor was that he hadnevermissed a carrier landing, not even as a trainee. A smooth operator in every way there was.
Falisha had called her Mom this morning for help talking herself out of marrying him. All her mother had done after listening to her was sigh. Then she’d said,I know exactly how ya feel, honey. Trust me. Exactly!Her promise to also be there when Gabe was gone—to patch Falisha back together afterward—hadn’t been encouraging, but it had been thick with the voice of experience.
Paddles, as the Landing Signals Officer was commonly known, didn’t have to say a word to Gabe. Not one single correction, because Gabe reallydidfly the same way he made her feel—like an angel.
The carrier was moving ahead at twenty knots, into a fifteen-knot wind, giving Gabe thirty-five knots of help in nailing the landing. Flying at a hundred and thirty-five knots, he was moving at only a hundred relative to the ship—a twenty-five percent advantage.
A US carrier’s landing area was angled ten degrees to the side from the carrier’s centerline so that if there was a major problem, the approaching plane could take off again without slamming into the planes launching from the bow. Or, if a worst-case scenario occurred and a plane went into the ocean, it would go off the side and not be run over by the aircraft carrier.
That was a problem with many other nation’s carrier designs but not America’s supercarriers. It made the landing trickier but US Navy pilots were the best in the world and proved it with every landing they made. Damn but she loved being in the service.
That angle meant that Gabe had to constantly sideslip as he simultaneously managed his angle of descent, his yaw, thrust, and a jillion other minutiae that had been trained to the point of instinct.
He flew clean all the way to the deck. So focused on that Number Three Wire that he wouldn’t see anything else.
It was so damn sexy to watch him fly.
It would help if the man didn’t know that.
