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Captain Debbie Smithey brought her MH-47G Chinook Princess Jennie in low over the end of the McChord field runway. It was almost too big.
Her typical landing area was two hundred and twenty feet, her hundred-foot baby plus a rotor’s diameter of safety margin. In combat, she’d occasionally squeezed that sixty-foot margin down to six.
Gray Army Airfield on the other side of JBLM was sixty-one hundred feet long, but McChord was another four thousand, with a three-thousand-foot parallel strip. It was so expansive that it made her feel like a pinprick. For the show, they’d cleared most of the aircraft off the north parking apron and replaced them with hordes of people.
The Air Force show runners had been chapping her ass all through practice this week, as if they knew what her little Arm
