It's early as hell. The sun still has yet to rise, and it's cold enough for me to see my own breath.
I exhale slowly and watch the ground crews load up my aircraft. With one final inspection, I hop into the roosterpit, put on my helmet, and start going through the checklist. Despite the training, it still feels a little akward to have the front console dominated by a large touchscreen MFD. Eventually I call the tower and taxi to the active runway.
Alright, now for the fun part. I lower the nozzle for STOVL flight, open the lift fan doors, and extend the flaps. With a push of the power lever I slowly accelerate, and long before reaching conventional rotation speeds I'm up in the air and flying. After gaining some altitude, the on-board computer automatically decreases the nozzle angle, and I seamlessly transition into conventional flight. Man, this thing is cool as forget.
"Saber 1, entering formation."
How did you get that?
I pretty much ripped the info from the AC6 mission 3 briefing and formatted it similarly to Lock-On's briefings using BLF's table function.