Part 3: The Board

Part 3: The Board

Brooks flipped the logbook open with a practiced snap of her thumb, her eyes darting across the maintenance entries. Then she looked up, her expression a mix of lingering irritation and malicious glee.

“Hale’s not just flying today,” she muttered, a slow grin spreading across her face. “He’s in the 0600 block. Evaluator pilot checkride. And look who’s scheduled to sit in the left seat.”

I didn’t answer. I just reached down, picked up my helmet bag, and checked the zipper.

“Chief Warrant Officer Four,” Brooks read aloud, her voice dropping an octave in mock solemnity. “That’s you. You’re his IP.”

“That’s what the schedule says,” I replied quietly.

Over by the operations board, the noise level had suddenly dropped. The lazy banter between Hale and Pike had evaporated.

Lieutenant Hale stood frozen inches in front of the freshly pinned flight schedule. His coffee cup was still raised toward his mouth, but he wasn’t drinking. His eyes were glued to the white paper, scanning line by line, column by column, desperate for a clerical error that wasn’t going to appear.

Pike was leaning over his shoulder, reading along.

We watched the transformation in real-time.

Hale’s shoulders stiffened. The casual slouch he had carried across the flight line vanished, replaced by the rigid, awkward posture of a junior officer who had just realized he was standing on a digital landmine. Slowly, painfully, he turned his head away from the board.

His eyes locked onto tail number 47.

Then they locked onto me.

The Walk of Dread

Hale started walking back toward the aircraft, leaving Pike stranded by the operations wall like a bystander abandoned at the scene of an accident.

Every step Hale took across the concrete seemed heavier than the last. The cocky bounce in his stride was gone, replaced by the mechanical, reluctant march of a man walking toward a firing squad.

I didn’t move. I stood right where I was, leaning casually against the forward landing gear fairing, waiting for him to close the distance.

When he reached me, he didn’t speak immediately. He just stood there under the glaring white lights of the floodlamps, his face cycling through a dozen different shades of pale.

“Ma’am,” he finally managed, his voice tight, cracking slightly around the edges.

“Lieutenant,” I said. My tone was neutral—neither warm nor cruel, just heavy with the dull weight of professional inevitability.

“I… I didn’t realize—”

“That you shouldn’t assume?” I finished for him. “No, Lieutenant. Clearly, you didn’t.”

Hale swallowed hard. His eyes darted nervously toward Brooks, who was carefully pretending to inspect a blade on the main rotor system while actively suppressing a laugh that was shaking her shoulders.

“I thought you were a visitor, ma’am,” Hale whispered, looking like he wanted the concrete to open up and swallow him whole. “I apologize for the comment. It was completely unprofessional.”

“It was,” I agreed, looking straight into his eyes. “And if you can’t tell the difference between a civilian tourist and the standardization pilot evaluating your flight readiness, I have serious concerns about how you’re going to handle a hydraulic failure at two hundred feet.”

Hale stood at attention, his fingers curling tightly around his empty coffee cup. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ve got twenty minutes until engine start,” I said, checking my watch and letting the silence stretch just long enough to make it uncomfortable. “Your pre-flight is supposed to be thorough, Lieutenant. And considering you spent the last ten minutes chatting up visitors instead of checking your aircraft, I suggest you start running.”

“Right now, ma’am!”

He spun on his heel and practically sprinted toward the nose of the Black Hawk, dropping into a frantic, hyper-focused pre-flight inspection. Every gauge, every rivet, every control surface suddenly received ten times more attention than it ever would have on a normal day.

Inside the Cockpit: The Anatomy of a Checkride

Ten minutes later, Brooks and I climbed up into the cockpit.

I strapped into the left seat—the Pilot in Command and Evaluator chair. Hale slid into the right seat, his movements jerky and over-calculated. His hands trembled ever so slightly as he adjusted his kneeboard.

“Aircraft power, on,” Hale muttered, his voice echoing loudly through the internal comms system.

“Check your switches, Lieutenant,” I said evenly. “You’re rushing. When you rush, you miss things. And today, I am not here to catch them for you.”

“Understood, ma’am.”

The auxiliary power unit whined louder, and the turbine spun up with a rising, metallic shriek that vibrated through the airframe. The smell of jet fuel grew sharper inside the cabin.

Across the flight line, the sun was finally beginning to crest the horizon, bleeding a bruised orange and purple light across the horizon. It was going to be a clear day, but right now, the wind was picking up off the tree line, kicking up a dusting of loose gravel against the windshield.

“Engine one, starting,” Hale called out, his eyes darting frantically across the multi-function displays.

“Watch your EGT,” Brooks chimed in from the back cabin, her voice flat and professional, though I could hear the smirk behind it. “Don’t hot-start it on us, sir. We’ve got paperwork to do.”

Hale’s jaw tightened. He didn’t look back. He kept his hands steady on the collective and cyclic, managing a textbook-perfect engine start.

I let him sit in the silence for a moment, watching his reflection in the glass.

“You know, Hale,” I said quietly over the ICS, keeping my eyes fixed on the checklist.

“Ma’am?”

“The hardest part of flying isn’t the stick-and-rudder work. It’s keeping your ego small enough to fit through the cabin door.”

Hale didn’t look at me. He stared straight ahead through the windshield, watching the rotor blades blur into a spinning silver disc against the morning sky.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said softly. “Lesson learned.”

“Good,” I settled back into my seat, resting my hands lightly on the controls. “Let’s see how you fly.”