Chapter 29: Up, Up, and Away

“This job is crazy!” you shout, wiping sweat from your forehead and panting, hands on your knees. Thankfully, you’ve got a few seconds before another plane is going to land and it starts all over again.

“At least you didn’t drop any of those black suitcases!” says Melvin. “The bomb squad is dealing with those.”

Just then a harried looking man with a clipboard runs up. “Hey!” he says, “Are you the new hire?”

“Y..yes…” you say, catching your breath.

“Well, what are you doing here? We need you out on the runway, right now! Come on!”

You shrug at Melvin, and follow the man out of the terminal onto the runway. Maybe now you need to load bags on a plane? He briskly walks over to a small yellow airplane. “You’re the new pilot, right? We need this P41 tested to be sure it’s ready for duty. Fly it out across the Polo Grounds. Stay to the right of red pylons, and left of blue ones. There’s a lot of balloons out there today for some weird reason, so watch yourself.” He looks at his clipboard. “Your resume says you’re pretty hot stuff – our Polo Grounds speed record is 37 seconds – if you beat that, you’ll be our resident Sky Star! Good luck!” he calls, walking away, as briskly as when he arrived.

You start to chase after him, but Melvin stops you. “Don’t you see? This is our big chance! We have to get into space, and to do that, we need piloting experience!”

“But I don’t know how to fly a plane!”

“It’s easy, I can talk you through it. Come on, get in!” urges Melvin.

“We could go to jail!”

“No, we won’t… the security at this airport is terrible.”

You can’t argue with that… and, well, this little yellow plane doesn’t look that hard to fly…

Put the Sky Jinks cartridge into your Atari 2600. Use game select 1. Set difficulty switches to b. Play until your score is less than 37 seconds. Post a link to a video in the comments section of yourself completing the challenge.