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He brings up the observation and starts walking us through it.
And just like that, Ruth isn’t the hurricane I’ve been watching strengthen on my phone all day anymore.
She’s headings, weather, aircraft limits, and a whole list of decisions Colston and I are going to have to make once we’re close enough to see what she’s really doing.
Sondra takes over when Des finishes with the weather side of the brief. She runs us through the amended plan and what they want collected on the mission.
When she gets to the aircraft, Brian looks up from the paperwork in front of him.
“What’d maintenance find on that discrepancy?”
“They reran the check and cleared it,” Sondra says. “Sign-off should be done.”
Brian nods once and goes back to the paperwork.
Des brings the route up again, and Colston and I start working through it with him. We go over the weather between Lakeland and Ruth, fuel and alternates, where we expect to start picking up the outer bands, and what we should be seeing on radar before we ever get close to the eyewall.
Colston studies the route for a few seconds. “If that northeast side keeps building, what are you expecting by the time we get there?”
Des switches back to the latest imagery. “It’ll probably be worse than what the Air Force crew just saw. You’ll have newer radar by then, so nobody’s committing you to anything from this room.”
I nod. That’s what I wanted to hear.
I keep my attention on the route while Colston and Des work through the last of it, already picturing what we’ll need to see on radar before we make the first penetration.
The P-3 can take a hell of a beating, but that doesn’t mean we ever assume Ruth is going to cooperate. We’ll make the call based on what she’s actually doing when we get there.
Having a plan is all well and good, but it can quickly go to shit, and you have to be adaptable to get through it and come out in one piece.
By the time we’ve worked through the route and the first penetration, I’ve got as clear a picture as I’m going to get before we’re airborne.
Sondra looks around the table. “Anything else?”
I ask Des to compare the last two fixes one more time so I can see how quickly Ruth’s structure changed between passes.
After that, nobody has anything else.
Sondra closes the folder in front of her. “Alright. Dismissed.”
Chairs scrape back from the table as everyone starts moving at once.
Brian’s the first one out of the room, already heading to find whoever has the maintenance sign-off he’s been waiting on.
Colston falls into step beside me as we head back through operations. The grin is still there, but he’s quieter now, his attention shifting toward everything we need to get done before we walk out to the plane.
“You good?” I ask.
He glances over at me. “Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
His mouth pulls into a crooked smile. “This is gonna be a hell of a flight.”
Someone calls Colston’s name from across operations, and he veers off toward one of the workstations while I head for the rest of my gear.
I’m ready to get in the air.
CHAPTER 35
