Threading the Needle

Threading the Needle was a famous and dangerous starship maneuver that involved flying through the Stone Needle, a ring-shaped rock outcropping in Beggar's Canyon. The gap in the Stone Needle was exactly wide enough to be cleared by a skyhoppers wings and thus left no room for pilot error. Shortly after Biggs Darklighter returned to Tatooine for the last time, Laze "Fixer" Loneozner challenged Luke Skywalker to a starship race, prompting Skywalker to 'thread' the needle while flying his T-16 skyhopper, nearly killed himself on a reckless burnout run. which burned the skyhopper's instrumentation and damaged its central airfoil, leaving it inoperable. Lacking a real T-16 to fly and grounded for the rest of the season by his Uncle Owen Lars, Skywalker turned to playing with his model T-16.

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