Fernando Esparza

"This is UNSC Pelican Echo 216. Can you hear me?"

- Echo 216's pilot tries to hail a friendly signal. The Pelican Echo 216 is piloted by a serviceman of the United Nations Space Command Armed Forces who, at some point following the advent of late 2561, had a chance encounter with Spartan-II John-117 after being stranded in his dropship for some time around a shattered Halo ring.

Biography
"We lost. Lost everything. There's nothing left for us here. I don't even know where here is."

- The pilot lets the Chief know about their present situation. At some point around late 2561 this pilot was asleep in the cockpit of his Pelican around a Halo ring when a shaking of the craft and repeated warnings suddenly woke him. Pressure was building in multiple lines but he managed to initiate a protocol which caused the warnings to cease. Just then, however, a piece of debris impacted Echo 216's rear, creating a breach. Her pilot rushed to seal it and was successful in doing so, but in the process he slipped and fell from the box he had been standing on to reach it. When he hit the floor a recording device came out of his pocket and rolled away. This device—containing a recorded message from his wife and daughter—was a small comfort to him over the weeks which followed, during which time he remained stranded in the Pelican near the broken ring.

Eventually, after repeated viewings of the same message his recording device lost power. It was almost immediately after this, however, that Echo 216 alerted him to the presence of a signal with a friendly designation. He raced to the cockpit and hailed the signal, but before he could identify himself twice he wiped away frost on the cockpit window to reveal an armored Spartan floating nearby: Master Chief Petty Officer John-117. Bringing the hulking warrior aboard revealed that his armor's survival mode had been triggered. To override it the pilot rerouted what little power remained to Echo 216 into the armor, and was thrilled when parts of the Pelican's interior which had gone dark from a lack of energy suddenly flared to life thanks to that generated by the suit's fusion reactor. The pilot enthusiastically welcomed the Chief back after seeing that he'd reawakened. He also noticed that something appeared to be wrong with the servos the man's gauntleted hands, but before he could locate a tool to check his armor's diagnostics John approached him and asked for a status report. This caught Echo 216's pilot off guard, but he then realized the Chief may not know about what had happened to the nearby ring and so turned his attention to the cockpit. As the Spartan laid eyes on what remained of it he explained that they had lost everything here—though he added that he didn't even know where "here" was. Then, without warning, Echo 216 was hit by something which generated electrical discharges within it and enveloped it in bright light. Her pilot panicked at this and signaled to the Chief that he had witnessed this sort of attack before. He advised that they needed to flee, but John disagreed, instead stating that they needed to fight. At that point, the pilot sealed himself within the cockpit while the Spartan took up a position in the troop bay. The Chief told him to get ready right before the pilot opened the rear hatch so he could go on the offensive.

Production notes

 * The pilot was first revealed in the Halo Infinite - E3 2019 - Discover Hope Trailer, in which he rescues John-117 from space. He was confirmed to be a new character for Halo Infinite in a blog post on Halo Waypoint on the same day.
 * He has the Human-Covenant war era UNSC insignia on his shoulder, rather than the post-war era emblem.

List of appearances

 * Halo Infinite