The Aurora transports limped along the sky. Having been consigned to the scrapyards even before being finished, these sad airships had been leaking helium for hours, the brave Filipinos aboard slowly dying of battle wounds, made worse by infections from rotting corpses of the airships' former crew, and the mind-numbing monotony of blue skies and dark clouds.
Then an eastern wind blew across the fleet. It carried water vapours, which had a slight taste of rainwater in them. However, unlike normal rainwater, the taste was more tangy, tasteless, and dry (ironically for water). It tasted like well-brewed tropical typhoon.
"Stooorm!"
"What? Where? When?"
The surroundings were still tranquil, relatively.
"Not yet, but soon! It tastes like...it's about 6 hours away."
A sharp smack shut up the stormtasting soldier. Meanwhile, some of the crew spotted a lonely Japanese-claimed airport in the middle of an island.
Commander Mabini looked at the airship captain. "Could you land this airship on that airport? I'd like to capture it, you know, repair this thing by itself faster. a storm is coming up and..."
"I don't think so commander. There's no mooring tower on that thing, and we can't possibly outrun a storm. Our best bet is to hope that this airship fleet could fly above the storm, but with no extra helium it'd be impossible."
The commander paused for a while. He then turned around, and over the airshipwide public announcement system he relayed the message "Who would like to volunteer to capture that Japanese-held airport beneath us?"
However, his PA system is less than effective, consisting of soldiers shouting the single message all over the airship until stopped. A school bus would've been more civilized. Finally, someone responded. It was all the Engineeros, the whole airship repair crew, who have put so much effort repairing a badly damaged airship with nothing more than planks and prayers. And they were eager to leave ship; they were sick of it.
"Sorry. Just one." The Engineero corps then began to fight over who gets to leave the hellish airship. The commander just sighed, pulled an Engineero from the rumbling pile of similar units, gave him a gun and a rappelling system, and kicked him out of the Aurora. The Engineero plummeted a few hundred feet, shouting and screaming for dear life all the way down, before he dropped his gun. Despite his 'fall' being regulated by a very long cable from the airship. The Engineero realized that he dropped his gun onto the airport's glass roof below him, and watched as the gun fell down faster than himself, and then did he realize that he was not falling at 9.8 m/s^2.
Meanwhile, the sole Japanese Engineer, operating the captured airport, was enjoying a cup of tea. He looked up the airport's skylight, enjoying the final rays of the tropical sun before it would be totally covered by the typical tropical depression that battered the Philippines twenty times a year. He took a sip of tea under the warm waning sun, when he was disturbed by a loud THUD above him. The skylight shattered above him, raining shards of sharply lethal glass. The Japanese Engineer was only a few seconds from impalement when he was able to take cover underneath his chair, as a blinding crystalline downpour went about him, reflecting the sunlight in shades of bright sparkling yellow and Spectrum Tower bolts around him. For a split second it was a very surreal scene of immense beauty, until the Engineero's gun, which broke the skylight in the first place, landed with a heavy thud on a floor discharging munitions with its barrel right before the Japanese Engineer's eyes.
When the Engineero landed, quite safely, there was glass and blood all over the floor as the lifeless form of the Japanese Engineer rolled out from under his chair, tea spilling from his last cup. A bunch of Filipino soldiers dropped in as well and joined the Engineero, garrisoning the airport. "I don't know why they never thought of garrisoning their own tech structures...", Commander Mabini said with a shrug. Almost immediately canisters of helium were lifted up the cables, together with chairs, fixtures, and anything else that can repair the airship. With haste the airships left.
"Do you hear me now? This in Engineero Perez, in the Air Traffic Control Tower. And yeahp, I now have a good view of the gaping hole on the left side of your airship. Yeah, left side. Here it is, I've got this airport's How to Repair Your Kirov manual here (how come we never have our own photocopies of this book in our base? Oh, yeah, the Copyright Committee won't let us have a copy of this without buying it. So overpriced!) Now listen, the first step in repairing the rib at 34AYC is to weld...of course you should first remove the piece of string there! That string's only because we don't have anything else to put together those..."
Commander Mabini just nodded. "So that's how capturing airports make aircraft auto-heal..."