Night Flight

Night Flight was a flight of four prowlers attached to the UNSC Navy's Task Force Yama. During Operation: SILENT STORM in early 2526, Captain Halima Ascot commanded the flight—and the entire task force—from aboard the, a. However, Night Flight lost its commander and flagship during the Battle of Seoba in March 2526.

Netherop
In early March 2526, at least one vessel of Night Flight—Captain Halima Ascot's —participated in a mission to board and capture a Covenant frigate. The operation would be undertaken by three teams of Spartan-IIs led by Petty Officer John-117. On March 5, the Spartans deployed from the Starry Night as it and its target orbited Netherop While they were able to board the ship undetected, the mission went south when an insurrectionist-aligned sensor operator on one of Lieutenant Commander Hector Nyeto's prowlers purposefully revealed the Spartans' presence on the vessel. Ultimately, they were forced to abandon ship when the frigate's self-destruct was activated.

SILENT STORM
Shortly after this mission, the prowlers of Night Flight were assigned to Task Force Yama, a splinter group of Vice Admiral Preston Cole's Battle Group X-Ray. From aboard the Starry Night, Captain Ascot would lead the task force of prowlers for the duration of Operation: SILENT STORM, a daring mission to board and destroy Covenant vessels and stations with the intent of slowing their advance through the Outer Colonies.

This operation took Night Flight and the rest of Task Force Yama to Seoba, an icy moon of Biko. Here, they planned to wait until the Covenant fleet arrived, planning to catch them by surprise. Upon arriving at Seoba on March 18, the task force discovered insurrectionist forces hiding in the very ice quarry that the task force had selected to hide its prowlers, leading to an intense battle. The UNSC captured the quarry, only for a Covenant Bloodstar Flotilla to arrive the next day. With their window rapidly closing, the prowlers of Task Force Yama were loaded up with the ODSTs of Colonel Marmon Crowther's 21st Space Assault Battalion—the troopers that would be carrying out the boarding operations. The final company had just boarded the four vessels of Night Flight when the flotilla began bombarding the quarry, forcing Captain Ascot to launch them immediately. However, it was too late and the Starry Night was hit by one of the plasma blasts, causing it to crash into the quarry. Captain Ascot and much of her crew were killed by the impact, which torn open the vessel's bow. Lieutenant Commander Nyeto was able to confirm that the vessel itself was still intact, but its crew could not be raised on comms. Colonel Crowther scrambled to find a unit of his that could check on them. The three remaining prowlers of Night Flight—and the Black Daggers they held—were eager to assist, even if it meant turning back into the increasingly heavy plasma barrage. Crowther denied their offer, not wanting to lose another prowler. As a result, John-117 decided that he and his Spartans were the only unit that could make it to the Starry Night in time. Once they completed their assignment of loading the captured insurgents into a transport to be taken to Biko, the Spartans ventured back into the quarry to search for Ascot's prowler, ignoring the fact that Crowther had refused to send them into battle after learning of their young ages.

The Spartans soon found the wrecked Starry Night, sitting halfway up an ice flow roughly seven hundred meters above the quarry floor. However, a Covenant intrusion corvette had beaten them to the crash site, and was already deploying troops to secure the vessel for recovery. Taking drastic action, the Spartans caused an avalanche to deny incursion into the prowler, and to also bring it to closer to them on the quarry floor below. Unfortunately, half of the twelve-Spartan squad had become buried under the ice flow, and three more corvettes had arrived to support the first. Despite this, a small team was able to board the Starry Night and arm the vessel's nuclear self-destruct system. Meanwhile, under direction from Nyeto, the task force shot down two of the nearby intrusion corvettes and chased off a third. All of the Spartans and the survivors they had found aboard the Starry Night made it to safety before the nuke detonated, destroying the both the flagship of Night Flight and the Covenant corvette that was trying to recover it for study.

Composition

 * Four prowlers

List of appearances

 * Halo: Silent Storm