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“We still don’t know who she is,” Colby fumbled for his apartment keys with little luck. It had taken only minutes to get Arnson’s and Lieber’s approval. But then they had to rush out to Anacostia and work with the pilots to perform test flights and work out a dozen unanticipated bugs with the plan.
The three HMX-1 helicopters of any Marine One mission were always shifting in position. If they shifted so that one helo was above the rotors of another one, the blades chopped up the laser-based transmission.
And the interface between the radio and the laser system wasn’t direct. It required a human relay because the data bus interfaces on the voice-to-laser transmission systems were not CAAS compatible. And that had only been the beginning.
The problems dragged on through most of the d
