Flt. Lt. Nick "Zipper" Palmer, RAAF (ret.)

Nick Palmer has flown, and in many cases crashed, every modern flying machine devised by man. Known to his buddies in the Royal Australian Air Force by the call sign "Zipper" (named for a VERY unfortunate flight suit accident in the locker room), Palmer seemed to have the worst luck they had ever seen in a pilot. Each tremendous success in training or in test flights was followed soon after by an equally tremendous failure. Eventually the price tag for Palmer's failures reached a point where the service could no longer afford him and he had his flight status revoked. After serving out the remainder of his contract flying a desk, Palmer retired from the RAAF.

He flew as a mercenary pilot for a few years for a number of Third World nations before the work (and the paychecks) began to dry up. Soon after he started looking for legitimate work in the commercial sector when he was offered a job as a test pilot for a major U.S. aviation firm. Palmer "neglected" to put the ENTIRETY of his flight service record with the RAAF on his application, and was naive enough to believe that they wouldn't investigate him. In fact they had, but the company was desperate as every qualified pilot they approached refused to fly this design that had claimed a number of lives.

Palmer's trial flights were a smashing success, and with that success, the company's engineers were able to work out a number of design flaws. Their design issues resolved, the company was able to begin production, meet their contractual obligations and avoid bankruptcy. Soon after, Nick Palmer received a message that the boss wanted to congratulate him. That was when "Zipper" met Alex Nelson for the first time. From that time on, as Nelson moved from company to company, he has taken Palmer with him, to either test aircraft or to be his personal pilot and, in some cases, bodyguard.

Nick Palmer is an asset to any company. A tough guy that can handle himself in a fight or in the cockpit, Palmer is proficient with a number of weapons and in fluent in French, Arabic and Japanese. Palmer is the kind of person that can "get things" and seems to have a contact in every city he visits, though as a notorious "ladies man," most of the contacts tend to be former lovers.