Out of Bullets, Out of Time: How a Tired Fighter Pilot Faced a Racing Flying Bomb Over a Sleeping City, Dared to Touch Its Wing With His Own, and Turned an “Impossible” Mid-Air Flip Into a Lifesaving Last Resort

The first time Lieutenant Jack Ralston saw a flying bomb, he thought it looked almost harmless.

From a distance, in the hazy summer dusk over the channel, it resembled a clumsy little airplane that someone had drawn without caring about symmetry. No cockpit. No pilot. Just a stubby fuselage, straight wings, and a pulse jet pipe glowing faint red at the back. A toy, if you didn’t know what it carried in its nose.

Then he’d watched one hit.

He’d seen the orange flash blossom on the horizon. He’d felt the distant thump in his chest even at altitude. Later, he’d flown over the smoking hole where a row of houses had been, where families had gone to bed believing the night sky was just something to fall asleep under.

After that, the flying bombs never looked harmless again.

Now, weeks later, he was chasing one.

Hard.

Jack’s P-47 Thunderbolt bucked in the rough air over the English coast, engine roaring near full power as he punched through a low layer of cloud. His instruments jittered. Beads of condensation slipped sideways on the canopy.

There.

Ahead and below, a small dark shape streaked toward the mainland, tail flame sputtering like an angry torch.

“Command, this is Flash Two,” Jack said into his throat mic, breath a little tight. “Visual on one—repeat, one—flying bomb headed inland, low level, fast.”

The radio crackled in his ears.

“Copy, Flash Two,” came the controller’s calm voice. “You are cleared to engage. You are the only interceptor in position. Make it count.”

Make it count.

As if he needed the reminder.

Below, the coastline slipped by. Fields. Roads. Patches of woods. The distant suggestion of towns getting larger as the flying bomb streaked on.

Jack pushed the throttle forward just a hair more.

“Come on, girl,” he muttered to the Thunderbolt. “One more sprint.”

He’d been in the air for over an hour already, part of a standing patrol that felt less like flying and more like pacing a fence line. He was tired. His shoulders ached. His eyes burned from staring into the haze.

But the moment he’d seen that little shape with the ghostly tail flame, every nerve had sharpened.

He eased the stick, lining up behind and slightly above the target. The flying bomb didn’t climb or dive, didn’t jink or react. It just droned on with mechanical indifference.

No pilot. No fear.

Just a guidance system and a warhead.

He flicked the safety covers off his gun switches.

“Guns hot,” he told nobody in particular.

He’d shot down three of these things in the last week. The procedure was simple, at least on paper: approach from behind, offset slightly. Aim for the wing root or fuel area. Fire short bursts. Don’t get too close when it goes up.

He put the glowing bead of his gunsight just ahead of the flying bomb’s stubby wing.

This will be quick, he told himself. In and out, then home.

He squeezed the trigger.

The Thunderbolt shuddered as the eight .50-caliber machine guns in its wings spat bright lines of tracers. The bullets streaked toward the flying bomb—

And then the guns coughed.

They sputtered.

Then they went silent.

The trigger came back to his glove with a useless click.

Jack blinked, yanked the trigger again. Nothing.

His thumb darted to the gun switches—off, on, off, on—like that might magically fix something that was very clearly out of his reach in the wing roots.

“Come on,” he growled. “Not now.”

He squeezed again.

Silence.

His stomach sank.

“Command, this is Flash Two,” he said, forcing his voice to stay level. “My guns just went cold. I repeat, I’m out. No fire.”

There was a pause. A short one, but long enough for him to watch the flying bomb race on.

“Confirm, Flash Two,” the controller said. “You’re Winchester? No ammunition?”

“Affirmative,” Jack said, jaw tight. “I’m dry.”

He wasn’t sure what bothered him more—that the guns had run empty, or that he hadn’t even noticed how long he’d been firing in earlier engagements. Somewhere between trying to protect the sky and staying alive, the math had blurred.

“Any other interceptors in position?” he asked.

“Negative,” came the reply. “Next patrol is too far out. Ground batteries are tracking but coverage is limited. That one’s low and fast. Estimate impact in…”

The controller’s voice faded for a second as someone else spoke in the background.

“…less than three minutes if it stays on course,” he finished. “Flash Two, current trajectory takes it over populated areas. Advise?”

Advise.

Jack stared at the dark shape ahead, tail flame stuttering as it buzzed along.

He thought about what lay under that line of flight.

Not just “populated areas.” Houses. Streets. A factory where his kid brother’s friend worked. A church with a cracked bell where he’d sat through one of the longest Sundays of his life, listening to a vicar talk about endurance while his mind counted planes.

He thought of the night he’d flown over a burning block and seen fire trucks the size of matchsticks crawling like insects around the edges of the damage.

“Flash Two?” the controller prompted. “We need your status.”

His hand tightened on the stick.

“Still behind the target,” Jack said. “Close. No guns.”

He could break off. Watch it go. Radio in the impact point. Let the ground crews handle the aftermath.

His gut twisted.

There had been stories in the ready room. Wild ones. Pilots talked about everything on long, tired evenings—half superstition, half therapy. Some of the British flyers had mentioned an odd trick: getting close enough to a flying bomb to “tip” it with a wing. Not smashing into it, but using the pressure from the wingtip to disturb its gyroscopes.

“You don’t ram it,” one of them had said, sipping tea like he was explaining how to fix a leaky faucet. “You just… nudge the air. Make the little monster think the world’s sideways. If you’re lucky, it dives before it realizes what’s what.”

Everyone had laughed.

“Yeah,” another pilot had said. “They can tell that story about you at your memorial.”

Nobody at the table had admitted considering it.

Now, with the flying bomb cutting across the patchwork of fields and roofs below, Jack realized the story had lodged in his brain like a splinter.

“Command,” he said slowly, “I might have one more option.”

“Go ahead, Flash Two.”

“There’s something I heard the Brits have tried,” he said. “Using a wingtip to… disrupt the bomb. Flip it. It’s risky as sin. But if I can get close enough without contact—”

The controller didn’t answer immediately.

In that heartbeat, Jack considered his own words.

Using a wingtip to flip a flying bomb. It sounded insane out loud. It was insane. One wrong move and he’d be a streak of metal following the bomb down.

The controller came back on.

“Flash Two,” he said carefully, “this is not a procedure in your manuals.”

“No, sir,” Jack admitted. “But neither is letting that thing hit a town when I’m looking right at it.”

Another muted conversation on the other end. Time he didn’t have.

“Estimate to impact?” Jack asked.

“Under two minutes,” came the answer. “Maybe less. Decision is yours, Flash Two. We can’t order that maneuver.”

Jack understood what the controller wasn’t saying: If you try this and fail, it’s on you.

He watched the flying bomb’s exhaust flicker.

He pictured streets. Windows. A mother trying to get three kids to bed while the radio muttered in the corner.

He rolled his shoulders once, as if settling a weight.

“Copy, Command,” he said. “Decision taken.”

He pushed the throttle forward.

---

The Thunderbolt surged, closing the gap.

The flying bomb didn’t care. It kept its steady, droning course, oblivious.

“Okay, sweetheart,” Jack murmured to his P-47. “We’re going dancing with something that doesn’t know our names.”

He’d never trained for this. There were no diagrams. No step-by-step instructions. Just a half-remembered story and a sense of what the air did around a wingtip.

He eased to the side, sliding the nose of his fighter out of direct alignment with the bomb. The goal wasn’t to plow into it—that would simply trade one disaster for another. He needed to fly close enough that the pressure of his wing disturbed its balance.

Close enough to matter.

Far enough not to die.

“Flash Two, what are you doing?” Morales—no, that was someone else on frequency, another pilot from his squadron watching on radar or from a distance. It didn’t matter who.

“Trying something the maintenance boys are going to hate,” Jack said.

He focused on the flying bomb’s right wing, a stubby rectangle of metal and explosive-filled promise.

He drifted closer. Fifty yards. Thirty.

The bomb sat rock-steady, riding the air like a stone on a string.

The turbulence intensified as he approached. The air between his P-47’s wing and the bomb’s wing compressed and twisted in invisible ways, two pressure fields starting to interact.

Jack could feel it in the stick, in the slight shudder in the ailerons.

“Easy,” he whispered. “Easy…”

Below, a road flashed by. A farmhouse. A cluster of trees. Time was slippery now, each second stretched thin.

He brought his right wingtip closer.

Twenty feet.

Fifteen.

Every muscle in his body tensed, but his hands stayed steady. Years of flying, hundreds of hours in the air, compressed into this one sliding line of approach.

He remembered the British pilot’s words: You don’t ram it. You tip the air.

Ten feet.

The Thunderbolt’s engine thundered. The flying bomb’s pulse jet buzzed like a metal hornet.

Jack inched the fighter closer, until he could see every rivet on the little bomb’s wing, the uneven paint, the faint shimmer of heat from its exhaust.

“Come on,” he breathed. “Come on…”

The air between the two wings compressed harder, like a trapped animal.

The flying bomb wobbled.

Just a little.

Its right wing dipped, then popped back.

Jack held his position, fighting every instinct that screamed at him to pull away.

He nudged his own wingtip up—just a fraction—and then down again in a controlled, gentle arc.

The air reacted before the metal did.

A small, invisible hammer blow of pressure hit the flying bomb’s wing.

This time, the wobble was bigger.

The bomb rolled slightly to the left, nose swinging off its precise line. The gyros inside must have screamed in mechanical protest, trying to correct.

Jack kept his own wing hovering just inches away, riding the same turbulent pocket, pushing one sliver of air against another.

The bomb’s roll grew.

Five degrees.

Ten.

The nose dropped a fraction, then more.

He saw the horizon tilt in the bomb’s frame of reference.

Then, suddenly, gravity and bad design did the rest.

The flying bomb snapped into a steeper bank than it could handle. Its guidance system, confused, overcorrected. The tail dropped. The nose pitched forward.

In an instant, the thing that had been so steady turned into a tumbling misshapen dart.

Jack yanked his stick back and left, pulling away as the bomb rolled under him, trailing a sudden, desperate wobble of flame.

“Come on, fall,” he muttered. “Fall now…”

It did.

The flying bomb’s nose dipped, then pointed straight down, like a puppet with its strings cut.

It dove.

Jack craned his neck, watching.

The bomb slammed into an empty stretch of field well short of the town ahead. The explosion bloomed, a bright flower of light and smoke. The shockwave slapped his aircraft a second later, a firm push but nothing that threatened control.

He exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“Command,” he said, voice shaking just enough that he hoped the radio static would hide it. “Flash Two. Target has been… diverted. Impacted in open ground. No structures.”

There was a pause.

Then the controller came back, sounding different. Less detached.

“We see it, Flash Two,” he said. “Radar confirms. No hits in the populated area. Well done.”

Another voice cut in, someone from Jack’s squadron.

“Did you… did you flip that thing with your wing?” the pilot asked, disbelief thick in his tone.

Jack looked at his right wingtip. The paint was scorched, scuffed at the very end, but the metal looked intact.

“I gave it a suggestion,” he said. “It took it.”

He realized his hands were shaking now—not with fear of the bomb, but with the afterward of it all. The release. The realization of how narrow the margin had been.

“Flash Two,” the controller said, voice softer now. “You’re clear to return to base. We’ll want a full report. And maybe a drawing.”

Jack managed a laugh.

“Roger that, Command,” he said. “Turning home.”

He banked the Thunderbolt away from the rising smoke, toward the airfield that waited somewhere beyond the haze.

---

The debriefing room smelled of coffee, sweat, and typewriter ink.

Jack sat on a metal chair, helmet on the floor by his feet, flight jacket unzipped. Across the table sat his squadron commander, Major Reed, and a couple of intelligence officers. Someone had tacked a map to the wall with a red circle around the impact site.

“So let me get this straight,” Reed said, rubbing a hand over his face. “You ran out of ammunition. You closed with a flying bomb. And then you used your wingtip to flip it.”

Jack shrugged one shoulder.

“I didn’t exactly grab it like a dinner plate, sir,” he said. “I just… disturbed the air next to its wing until its guidance couldn’t keep up.”

One of the intelligence officers, a bespectacled captain with ink stains on his fingers, leaned forward.

“Did you actually touch it?” he asked.

Jack thought about that.

“I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “If I did, it was the lightest tap you can imagine. Most of what I felt was turbulence. Like flying through someone else’s prop wash. Only worse.”

Reed shook his head.

“I’ve heard of the Brits trying that on their side of the fence,” he said. “Never figured one of my own would be crazy enough to attempt it.”

“With respect, sir,” Jack said, “we were out of alternatives.”

Reed’s eyes softened.

“I know,” he said. “And I’m not calling you crazy as an insult. You just did something none of us had the nerve to put into a manual.”

The ink-stained captain scribbled notes.

“We’ll want to talk to some of the RAF chaps about their experiences,” he said. “Compare what they’ve seen with what you’ve done. There might be a way to formalize this. A last-resort procedure. Heaven help the poor training officer who has to explain it to new pilots.”

He smiled faintly.

Reed sat back.

“You realize,” he said, “that if this story gets out, half the squadron’s going to start bragging about knowing ‘the guy who punched a flying bomb with his wing.’”

Jack snorted.

“If it keeps them from thinking about what those bombs do on impact, they can call it whatever they like,” he said.

Reed’s expression grew more serious.

“That’s the other part of this,” he said. “You didn’t just pull off a stunt. You prevented a hit on a town. We’ve got people in that sector. Families. You took a risk to keep a terrible thing from happening where you could see it.”

Jack looked down at his hands.

“I kept seeing it in my head,” he said quietly. “All the way in. That glow. That sound. The hole afterward. I don’t know if I could’ve slept tonight knowing I’d watched one go in without doing absolutely everything I could.”

Reed nodded.

“That’s the part of the story that matters,” he said. “Not the wingtip. Not the trick. The choice.”

He stood.

“I’m putting you in for a commendation,” he added. “Whether or not they give it to you is above my pay grade. They may decide they don’t want to encourage this kind of thing.”

Jack blinked.

“I didn’t do it for a medal, sir,” he said.

“I know you didn’t,” Reed replied. “That’s why I’m comfortable writing it up.”

He reached for Jack’s helmet and tossed it lightly across the table.

“Get some rest,” he said. “You may find yourself giving a lecture on ‘improvised aerial gymnastics’ before the week is out.”

---

The lecture happened.

They gathered in a hangar, a mix of American and British pilots, engineers, and assorted curious types. Someone rolled out a chalkboard. Someone else produced a beat-up model airplane that had seen better days.

Jack stood at the front, feeling slightly ridiculous, pointing at diagrams of airflow and wingtip vortices while men who’d flown in more dogfights than he’d had birthdays asked careful, technical questions.

“So you never actually hit it?” one RAF captain asked, leaning forward.

“If I hit it,” Jack said, “you wouldn’t be asking me questions.”

Laughter rippled through the hangar.

“Seriously,” he went on, “the key is respecting the air. You’re not trying to move metal with metal. You’re trying to move metal with pressure. Think of it like standing in a shallow stream next to a log. You don’t need to shove the log. You just need to change the current it’s floating in.”

They talked about distances. Angles. Speed differences.

They talked about the right moment to break away before the bomb’s path and the fighter’s path intersected in an unpleasant way.

They talked about fear.

“I was scared,” Jack admitted, surprising himself with the honesty. “Anyone who tells you they’re not scared doing something like that is either lying or not paying attention. But I was more scared of what would happen if I didn’t try.”

Afterward, as the pilots filtered out, one of the younger British fliers lingered.

“You know,” the man said, “we had a bloke try something like that a while back. Only he went in too hard. Clipped the bomb. Lost half a wing. Didn’t make it.”

Jack swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The Brit nodded.

“Thing is,” he went on, “I think he’d be glad someone else made it work. You lot across the pond, you have a certain… disregard for the rule book.”

Jack managed a small grin.

“We prefer to call it ‘interpretation,’” he said.

The Brit laughed.

“Whatever you call it,” he said, “it saved some roofs last night. That’ll do.”

---

Months later, when the worst of the flying bomb attacks had passed and the war had moved on again, someone from a newspaper came around, notebook in hand.

They’d heard about “the pilot who flipped a flying bomb with his wing.” The story had grown in the telling. In some versions, he’d rammed it on purpose. In others, he’d done a barrel roll over it and somehow sent it tumbling.

Jack corrected the details where he could.

“No, ma’am,” he told the reporter, smiling politely. “I didn’t play catch with it. I just got close enough to make it nervous.”

She asked him how it felt.

He thought about the roar of the engine. The sight of that stubby wing so close. The shockwave of the explosion below.

“Like walking on ice,” he said. “One wrong step and you’re in the water. But the shoreline’s full of people you care about. So you walk.”

The article that eventually came out was less dramatic than the ready-room stories and more dramatic than Jack’s memory. That was how such things went.

But one line stuck with him.

It quoted him—sort of.

It said:

When asked why he risked his life to try an untested maneuver, Lieutenant Ralston replied, “Because letting that thing hit a neighborhood when I might have stopped it didn’t seem like an option I could live with.”

He didn’t remember phrasing it quite that neatly. But the truth of it felt right.

In the end, what mattered to him wasn’t being the man who’d “used his wingtip to flip a flying bomb mid-air.”

What mattered was that on one particular day, in one particular stretch of sky, he’d been out of ammunition, out of time—and not quite out of ideas.

He’d trusted his plane.

He’d trusted the thin, invisible currents of air.

And for once, in a war where so many people had no say in what fell out of the sky, he’d managed to put a falling thing somewhere it couldn’t hurt anyone.

Years later, when the war was over and the skies were full of peaceful contrails instead of angry ones, he would look up sometimes and think of that moment.

Of a dark shape.

Of a trembling wingtip.

Of a decision made in less than a minute that kept a quiet street from becoming a scar on the earth.

And he’d be grateful—not for the story—but for the fact that on that day, with no bullets left and no safe choices, he’d still had a way to say no.

THE END