Disclaimer: I don't own Cars, all characters and references belong to Disney.
Here's chapter seven, I just hope I got everything right…
Mach 2.25
I was falling.
I just jumped out an aircraft from almost 5000 feet above the ground level without a parachute and I still managed to enjoy the feeling of the wind blowing on my burnt skin. The pain was vanished and overall I was feeling great. It had been since before the crash that I didn't felt so good, so free.
Suddenly I started to feel a strange heat expanding from my chest as a blinding light struck my eyes.
For a moment I couldn't see anything but white nor I could feel anything. Not the wind and neither my own body. Then the light slowly vanished and after a few seconds I was able to hear the roar of the wind and watch the ground getting closer once more.
But as I slowly started to feel my body again I noticed that something important was definitely off. My body. I was suddenly able to feel a totally different body as if it always belonged to me. I could still move somehow but not like before.
Fuselage, engines, wings... I suddenly became very aware of what just happened. I was an aircraft.
I quickly recovered from the shock and instinctively pulled up giving full throttle to my engines. This time I managed not to crash, missing the tarmac of a taxiway by less than twenty centimeters. Having my landing gear retracted surely helped. With my nose pointing slightly up, still feeling a bit dazed, I started to climb slowly to a safer altitude and in the meantime I closed my eyes and focused on my new body.
Almost immediately I managed to recall on the lower left side of my field of view some of the data on my flight. Now I knew that I was traveling at a speed of 323 knots gaining 1500 feet per minute, I had just passed 13500 feet but I decided to keep climbing 'till flight level 400. I could feel every single little shift and correction that my new body was making almost automatically to take me exactly where I wanted to go.
I opened my eyes and decided to try to learn what kind of plane I had become. Surely a fixed wing, likely some kind of fighter jet. My two engines were powerful and I had afterburners, as I discovered when I pulled up after nearly kissing a taxiway at over 400 knots, they seemed also capable of 2D, pitch-axis only, thrust vectoring. I couldn't really take a look at my instrument panel but with all the digital data that I could recall and my HUD I knew I had to be something pretty modern, maybe fifth-generation.
In front of me, if I tried to look down, I could see my nose, it was pretty pointed and black. I could feel my two delta wings, two air intakes at the sides of my fuselage, two canted vertical stabilizers and two moving horizontal tails. I could also feel my retracted tricycle landing gear, flaps and flaperons. From the look of it I was pretty sure that I was now an F-22A Raptor. Not bad, not at all!
At this point I couldn't really hold myself back anymore, I started to test each one of my control surfaces performing a series of maneuvers that I never even imagined I would try outside the flight simulator 'till that moment. Then I leveled and I started to increase the power to my engines, it didn't take much time for me to brake the sound barrier and I didn't even have to use my afterburners! Breaking the sound barrier had always been my dream.
I couldn't believe it, I was so freaking happy. I kicked on my afterburners flying faster and faster 'till I reached Mach 2. And I knew I could go even faster!
For more than an hour I literally played in the sky then, when I finally managed to calm down a little, I tried to take the stock of the situation. Aviate, navigate, communicate. Those had to be my priorities, in that order. I thought I could handle the aviate part pretty well so now I had to find out where I was.
I started to play with my avionics and after a few minutes I started to get the hang of it, or at least the basics, however I was now out the east coast of the Japan over the Pacific Ocean. I took some time to check my autonomy before doing a 180-turn setting a route toward Italy, I was going to have to refuel before leaving China.
Now that I was flying to a known destination at a speed of Mach 1.82 and an altitude of 45000 feet I could focus on the communications.
Yeah, sure! I was an F-22 who appeared out of nowhere right over Tokyo's airport proceeding to try to crash in a taxiway and missing only to perform something between an air show and another failed suicide attempt right before disappearing at supersonic speed, now let me just open a flight plan. I wondered if there was something that I forgot to fuck up.
But hey! I was a freaking F-22! Stealth! I just had to try to stay under the radar of a couple of nations and to avoid landing in busy controlled airspaces and big airports. Yeah sure! If that was going to work I would find a way to kiss my own ass even in that form! I tried to shut down everything that could make me visible including the transponder I climbed up to 65000 feet and I waited for someone or something to try to shoot me down.
After 40 minutes of flight I started to think that maybe just maybe it really worked, or maybe I was just looking too pathetic.
However I still had to find somewhere to refuel. I descended to 10000 feet reducing my speed at 300 knots, there were lots of airports, many more than in our dimension. I decided to try a small, but not too small, airport near a little country town. Not too busy and the runway looked long enough for a possible screw up and go around, I still needed to figure out the leading-edge flaps along with many other things.
I turned on my radio and transponder before getting too close, it was in a class G* airspace and apparently, from the few English comms on the frequency, there wasn't any ATZ* but I still felt like to be polite and possibly safer letting them know where I was, who I was and what were my intentions.
"This is Knight1 coming from east, long final runway 09" I said in English hoping to be understood.
"Roger Knight1. Wind 120 3 knots, QNH 1013, landing at your discretion" Came the answer after a few seconds with a strong Chinese accent.
"Roger Knight1" I told them before starting my descent.
My very first landing as an aircraft. It was like back at my first solo flight, I was feeling pretty tense. Thanks to my previous experiences with my many flight simulators and video games I managed to slow down to a good speed and to lower my flaps and landing gear at the right moment.
Not bad for the first time, I thought happily after leaving the runway. Maybe I dropped down the front wheel a bit too hard because of my high speed and my flare hadn't been exactly perfect but I came out without any damage.
I kept rolling through the many taxiways following the signs for the fuel pumps until I reached the area where they were located. I stopped in and I looked around the trying to spot a JP-8* or F-34* sign I was almost about to leave when I noticed that I wasn't the only fighter jet in the area.
A white Shenyang J-8II was refueling in the back-left side of the yard. I rolled toward the J-8 and right next to him I found what I was looking for. I decided to wait for him to finish before refueling and I stopped a couple of meters away from the pumps. Not even five minutes later he was done but before leaving he looked at me, probably noticing me for the first time, and then proceeded to talk to me fast in Chinese. Only after a few seconds he noticed that I was just starring back at him blankly and realized that I couldn't understand a word of what he was trying to tell me, he then left after probably telling me goodbye, I wasn't sure.
Following his example I hooked up to the pump and after a few seconds I felt the fuel starting to fill my almost empty tanks. I looked around and saw a small pink sedan, looking pretty bored, who was parked at a desk near the entrance of the yard. The aircrafts gave her the numbers of their pumps and payed for their fuel before leaving. Once I was done I took my number in my mouth and I dropped it in a litter bin. After that I waited for a dark blue and yellow Embraer 190 who sounded Spanish and not so good with English to start to speak with the pink sedan before quickly pass behind him unnoticed and get out of the refueling area.
Less than ten minutes later I was flying again, invisible. I made four more stops in Russia wishing I had some external fuel tanks even if they took away my stealth factor. I was freaking fast but I couldn't really last long even with the help of supercruise.
I got some suspicious looks from a pair of Mig-23ML on my last stop. They were a boy and a girl, both pretty young, maybe in their teens. Or at least they sounded like that. They were almost identical, probably brother and sister or even twins, both with their dark green paint job and hazel eyes the only difference was their voices.
More than two months were passed since the crash but I still sucked in distinguishing vehicles' sex or their age, I could just tell apart the children because they were smaller. Watching them speak I realized that we had another problem. My brother and my sister looked pretty different from each other, they barely passed as siblings. I wasn't going to be able to pretend to be even their fourth cousin. Surely Rod was going to be surprised when we were going to meet...
Screw that, even my own siblings were going to have trouble at recognizing me. I guess I could still say I was adopted.
I taxied to the runway, taking off and heading to my final destination. Italy.
*Class G airspace: Basically there are 7 kind of airspaces: A, B, C, D, E, F, G. F and G are not controlled.
*ATZ: Stands for Aerodrome Traffic Zone and it's the area that surrounds some airports (usually they're 2000 feet high and 10 miles of diameter), some of them are controlled even if they're in a class G airspace, you have to ask the permission to enter and obey to the tower when you are inside them.
*JP-8: Stands for Jet Propellant 8 and is the NATO fuel now in use for military aircrafts.
*F-34: Is the NATO code for the JP-8 fuel.
