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Sunny: The Memoirs of an Airline Pilot When I came to Kerbspoke Air Force Base, I wanted to fly planes in the war. We were in the thick of it back then, with old fighters and bombers going out every day to the Kerbaic Ocean to fight the enemy, and we knew that the struggle wouldn't be over for a few more years. So, my choice was simple: either fight in the war, or tolerate "Loose Lips Sink Ships" posters for the rest of our time fighting. And so, I found myself walking to the airfield, with my medical information in hand, ready to stick it to The Man overseas. What was I thinking? I had only ever been in an airplane once before, and it was parked on the tarmac for the little kids to see at the Kerbspoke Air Show during the Depression. I had only ever seen an airplane fly a few times before, and now here I was, ready to put my life in the hands of someone who knew nothing about flying- my hands. My ignorance of flight. The general was happy for the new recruit- but, darn it, he was a general, and he had to be tough. "Sunny," he grunted, "you've got basic training for three months, and then you ship out to Kambodia. You're in barracks 12; you'll find your uniform on your bunk." I nodded. "THAT'S YES, SIR!" he bellowed. "YES, SIR!" I replied, and saluted. Then I spun around on my heels, and marched to my barracks. I was already getting the hang of this. I went up in an old crop-duster for the first time the next day. My instructor showed me how to start the engine, move the rudder pedals to taxi out to the runway, and then he performed the takeoff with his own set of controls in his seat. Then, once we were at altitude, he said, "Turn onto a southern heading." I contemplated the stick and the rudder pedals, and deftly stepped on the latter. The plane lurched sickeningly as we jolted broadside to the slipstream. "Sunny Kerman, what do you think you're doing?" The instructor arrested our sideslip and rolled the plane onto its side before pitching up. "When you're in an airplane, you don't turn, you bank." The rest of the three months processed like that, with me graduating to bigger and bigger craft, until finally I was at the controls of a Knat-27 bomber, practicing touch-and-go on the old dusty runway. After one of our landings, I pulled back on the stick and only a few seconds later, I felt a vibration shudder through the entire aircraft. "Engines two, three, and four are down," the engineer said. "I think we've hit some birds." Without even thinking, she feathered the engines and I turned around and landed back at the base. Thus I had handled the first in-flight emergency of my long career. Next time, however, there would be dozens of passengers counting on me to get them down to a runway intact. I climbed out of the bomber, and then the general delivered some bad news. "Sunny- you're not shipping out." "What?" I cried. I couldn't think of what I'd done wrong. "Apparently the scientists down in Las Kruces, or Kalamagordo, or some place in some desert were working on a super-bomb. The war in the Kerbaic is over." I was stunned. I had spent three months preparing to fly, wanting to fly, and I would fly. "Sir," I said, "I'm in the top of my class. Talent like this doesn't come along often. What can I do now?" He thought for a minute. "Well..." he muttered, "wherever kerbals go, destruction will follow. There will be another war soon." I was ignorant and naive, and I didn't think there would be another war for a long time. Later, when I was older and wiser, I knew that the wars would never end. But I was still young and stupid, and back then, there was one mother and one father and one son and one daughter in every family, plus a dog, and people drank alcohol from glasses that could hold a lot more bourbon and ice than they put in, and there wasn't any security at the airports, and people were too busy smiling and generally eating the spam-in-a-can that suburbia served then to fight in another war. So I said, "I don't really want to wait around for that, sir." "Well, then that reduces your options. You know some people are starting to use the airplane to get from one place to another? You know, like a train." I said I did know. "In that case, I heard Trans-Pan Airlines is looking for pilots. Go there, Sunny, and you'll be a rich kerbal." And so I left Kerbspoke Air Force Base, and I went to Kerbspoke Airport, and I said, "Gimme a job. I'll fly for fifty years." And in the end, it was actually sixty.