EXTRACT: Angel's Thunder, an Area 88 (2004) Fanfic

[Zaune]

(Hope I'm actually allowed to put non Big-O stuff up here. Very mild spoiler warnings if you haven't seen all twelve episodes yet.)

Combat Air Patrol was low-paying, offered little prospect of combat and was generally exceptionally dull, and therefore a popular duty with the cooler heads at Area 88 for its outstanding money-to-risk ratio. When he found himself flying CAP single-handed, as he was this morning, Shin generally set the automatic pilot to follow the allotted course and concentrated on keeping a close watch on the skies and his radar display; less conscientious pilots had been known to bring magazines.
“Zero-Zero section, please increase your altitude to angels twenty-five, we have a friendly formation about to enter final approach.”
“Copy that.” Shin disengaged the autopilot and pitched upwards, opening the throttles a little. “More meat for the grinder,” he added to himself, glancing to port as the formation of seven aircraft passed below. Four Phantoms and two Skyhawks of various ages, models and states of repair were being lead by a fighter he couldn't name, an odd-loking jet with forward canards almost half as big as its delta wings. The effect was far from pretty, though this was balanced out by the rather nicely-rendered tail art, a rearing Pegasus in white on a purple background. The pilot waggled its wings and gave Shin a jaunty wave, which he returned with some reluctance; he'd learned to wait until new pilots lived beyond their fifth mission or so before letting them become more than an anonymous face in a pilot-suit.
The radar warning receiver screamed at him. Shin banked violently without a conscious thought.
“Zero-Zero section, Big Sammy has eight new contacts in your vicinity, angels two and climbing fast!”
“I'd noticed, thank you!” he snapped, arming his Sidewinders and diving towards the rapidly climbing fighters. The RWR cut off as the enemy abandoned stand-off tactics; a bandit approaching head-on with a high rate of closure is a terrible guided missile target. Shin took a firm grip on the control column, fighting the increasing vibration as his F-5 passed Mach 1, and glanced into the overhead reflector to see if the new arrivals had reacted. The strange delta-winged fighter was formating on him, with the Phantoms not far behind; the Skyhawks had apparently weighed the odds and sensibly gotten out of the way.
“Okay, rookie,” Shin murmured. “Hope that ugly hunk of metal flies better than it looks!”
The enemy fighters held formation as they climbed; when the oncoming fighters pulled out of their dive, they would be vulnerable. As the two formations became closer, the ARAF formation began to waver. Surely they weren't going to...?
Shin half-rolled and shot through the enemy formation like a meteorite, passing between one wing-pair with less than a metre's clearance on either side. Their formation disintegrated into chaos, pilots instinctively sideslipping to avoid the madman in the Tiger II and then frantically trying to avoid slamming into each other or the Phantoms and Saab Viggen. It wasn't much of a dogfight; the MiGs had lost the element of surprise and had no intention of waiting for reinforcements to get airborne, and only Shin had enough fuel to dogfight for more than a couple of minutes. Nobody managed to set up a worthwhile missile shot before the dogfight broke up, and only a handful of cannon rounds were expended. Shin thought he might have clipped his target, as had one of the Phantoms and that weird-looking fighter with the fancy tail-art, and his own stabiliser had acquired a few holes.
“Zero-Zero section to base. Bandits disengaging, no casualties either side but I have some minor rudder damage, over.”
“Copy that, Zero-Zero section. Can you maintain CAP, over?”
“Stand by.” Shin tried a sideslip and a couple of rudder turns to gauge the extent of the damage, and swore under his breath. “Negative, base. I'm getting moderate vibration and seriously reduced control response; I'm not in immediate danger but there's no way it'll stand another dogfight, and it's only going to get worse if I stay in the air, over.”
“Copy. You're clear to land, but make it quick; the transit flight is approaching fuel-critical, over.”
“Understood.” Shin banked around with infinite care and lined up on the runway, lowering his landing gear and gliding in on low power. The Tiger II bounced lightly on its wheels and rolled towards the taxiway with scarcely a pause, only coming completely to rest directly outside the hangars. Shin went through his post-landing checklist and popped the canopy, standing up in the cockpit to inspect the damage to the F-5's tail. The rudder was hanging from one hinge, and the whole tail assembly was perforated; a stray 23mm round had given the unicorn emblem a pronounced squint.
Another debit against wherever he banked his luck. Shin cautiously applied his weight to the proffered ladder and got his feet back on the ground, concealing the involuntary trembling as the adrenaline left his system with the ease of long experience.
  The fighter he hadn't been able to identify rolled to a halt nearby. Its pilot opened the canopy and removed their... no,  her helmet and shook out her strawberry-blonde hair.
Shin's own helmet clattered to the ground unheeded. “It... it can't be...”

[R. Daniel 01]

It's alright. Three suggestions, if I may.

1. I think there are some spots where you could be a bit more concise.

Instead of writing "less conscientious pilots had been known to bring magazines," you could just say, "less conscientious pilots brought magazines."

2. The way the main character talks over the radio doesn't strike me as authentic; his sentences have long clauses. Maybe trained pilots are different, but I wouldn't be devoting so much thought to making full sentences if I'd just left a combat situation. Also, the response, "I noticed, thank you!" sounds very snippy, almost effeminate. It makes me dislike the main character.

3. This is going to sound bad, but it's easily fixed: you lost my initial interest. You set up this character's situation as boring and routine with the opening paragraph. That's fine with me, but only if you slap me with a surprise immediately afterwards. In this case, mention the strange jet and the dogfight. Mention it in the very first clause of the second paragraph. Use the rest of the story, before the final hook, to explain, not to build up.