It was every pilot's worst nightmare, the fear that you could never truly escape.
It was where you could do nothing except hear the wind rush past; where the calls of your fellow airmen were drowned out by the sound of your own heart beating.
Most times you just had to wait; because no matter what you did, you only fell farther from the sky and into despair.
The ground remained unseen, even though you knew it was approaching fast. The odds turned against you, no matter if you prayed or tried to stay strong. Unlike in a game of poker, where every player had a chance; the sky held all the cards, you just had to hope that you would win.
Hope was crucial to win, to survive a tailspin; but even that vanished as the sand slowly fell through the hourglass of time. Even though you knew there was a chance, even if it was small, that the winds would steady out, that the latch to eject would become unjammed, or that you weren't alone as you fell; sometimes it seemed that there was just the spinning sky.
Most struggle, but some just give into the fact that they would eventually hit earth and cease to live. Drifting downwards, towards the end, nothing will bring them back. Not others, trying to encourage or pleading to respond; there is only the sky.
As hope is abandoned and belief in life taken away; a person is just a shell, nothing left but the physical, no feeling left in the broken soul. Free fall can do that to a person, kill every reason to hope and live.
It is caused by being hit; taking damage that tears your vessel apart.
Free fall is a destructive, deadly path, one that is not always taken while in the air.
After a while, you don't notice (or don't care) that you are in free fall; but others do. They try to help, try to do something instead of watching you fall. But sometimes there was no way to help, despite the fact that they refused to accept it.
This is the situation facing the collection of men that were known as the Red Squadron, as one of their own entered a spiral towards death.