Sam Wilson (Earth-199999)

Sam Wilson, also known as the Falcon, is an American military veteran and hero known for his aerial winged suit that he used in the Air Force and now uses to fight alongside Captain America.

Biography

Project Insight

Sam Wilson was a pararescue trooper in the United States Air Force, operating the Falcon suit on two tours of duty in Afghanistan. By 2014, he was living in Washington D.C. and hosting support meetings for recovering veterans. He met the legendary hero Captain America, Steve Rogers, while out on a run, and the two became fast friends. They continued to bond as Rogers tried to figure out what his best course of action was as he grew increasingly frustrated with S.H.I.E.L.D. Some time later, Cap became a fugitive from S.H.I.E.L.D. and showed up at Wilson's home with Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff, to hide out safely. S.H.I.E.L.D. had been compromised from the inside by Hydra, who were concocting a scheme known as Project Insight that Cap and Widow believed went as high up as World Security Council member Alexander Pierce. Wilson offered his assistance, and his Falcon suit, in putting a stop to Hydra, recognizing an inherent value in helping Captain America.

The three heroes kidnapped Jasper Sitwell, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent whom they had reason to believe was secretly Hydra. They soon got him onto a high rooftop and Widow shoved him off, causing him to fall a great height before Falcon caught him in midair, afraid for his life. He revealed that Zola's algorithm was used to assess innumerable digital records of every person on Earth and determine threats to Hydra, both existing and in the future, by analyzing every detail of their past. Project Insight would then kill everyone chosen by the algorithm from the air with helicarriers. Cap, Widow, and Falcon took Sitwell captive with the plan to use him to get through DNA scans and shut down Insight's helicarriers—a risky plan, as Insight was set to launch in 16 hours. As they drove down the highway with Sitwell in tow, they were attacked by a Hydra assassin known as the Winter Soldier, who landed on the top of their car, smashed Sitwell's window, and threw him into traffic, killing him. The Winter Soldier was soon accompanied by other Hydra soldiers, leading to a full-blown military combat in the streets of Washington as the underequipped heroes attempted to escape. Cap and Winter Soldier met in hand-to-hand combat, knocking off the latter's mask and revealing him to be Cap's friend from World War II, Bucky Barnes. Cap said his name, but Barnes didn't recognize it. As he fled the scene, a legion of S.T.R.I.K.E. soldiers arrived and apprehended the heroes—a news chopper overhead prevented them from killing them outright. As they sat in the back of a S.T.R.I.K.E. van, one of the helmeted officers killed the other, revealing herself to be S.H.I.E.L.D. deputy director Maria Hill. The four escaped through the bottom of the van with a high-powered laser device, leaving S.T.R.I.K.E. none the wiser.

Hill led them to a nondescript building where S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury, believed to be dead after having been attacked by the Winter Soldier, was laying in a hospital bed, greatly injured but alive. He had used a drug to slow his heart rate to 1 BPM, faking his death to throw Hydra off of his case. Fury and Hill presented their plan to stop Hydra's Project Insight: each of three helicarriers would have to have their targeting equipment replaced by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s own hardware. Fury wanted to reclaim Project Insight for S.H.I.E.L.D., but Rogers asserted that all of it—Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D.—had to be taken down to assure humanity's safety and freedom. Fury reluctantly agreed. With about two hours left until Insight's launch, Cap, Falcon, and Hill infiltrated the Triskelion and took over its P.A. system. Cap informed everyone in the building that Hydra was among them, including Pierce, all of S.T.R.I.K.E., and the helicarrier teams. Meanwhile, Widow was sent in to pose as a member of the World Security Council using advanced cloaking technology.

Cap and Falcon each boarded one of the helicarriers and managed to switch out their respective targeting equipment as Hill advised them from the Triskelion. The two arrived at the final helicarrier, only to be confronted by the Winter Soldier. He ripped one of Falcon's wings off and threw him down, forcing him to parachute to safety. As Cap and Winter Soldier fought in the core of the helicarrier, Falcon landed on the Triskelion below and Hill informed him that S.T.R.I.K.E. leader Brock Rumlow was on his way to interrupt Widow as she and Fury handled Pierce: Pierce killed the rest of the World Security Council, but Fury and Widow used his retinal scan (along wiht Fury's own) to decrypt all of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s files and release them to the public, effectively putting an end to S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra on the global stage. Fury then shot and killed Pierce. Falcon intercepted Rumlow and the two fought, but they were interrupted by one of the helicarriers crashing into the side of the building. Cap had successfully modified the final craft's targeting, causing each of the helicarriers to fire upon each other and plummet from the sky. Cap fell from the final helicarrier into the river, and—though no one saw this—was recovered, unconscious, by the Winter Soldier, who left him on the shore and went off his own way. As Rogers recovered, Wilson sat by his hospital bed to keep him company. Later, the two visited Nick Fury's grave, and Fury offered Wilson to come with him to Europe to root out any remnants of Hydra. He declined, and he and Cap instead decided to search for Bucky Barnes, using a file Romanoff had gathered on his potential whereabouts.

The Avengers

Falcon continued to search for Bucky into 2015 while Captain America handled responsibilities with the Avengers, but made little headway. Following the destruction of Ultron, Falcon was recruited to the Avengers along with War Machine, Vision, and Wanda Maximoff. Later that year, while Falcon was overseeing the Avengers' compound in upstate New York, he looked into a breach caused by a man in a suit calling himself Ant-Man. He politely introduced himself and asked to borrow a mechanical part from one of the warehouses on the compound, but Falcon was suspicious and tried to apprehend him. Ant-Man apologized and resisted, and managed to use his unconventional tactics of shrinking and growing at will to get one up on the relatively experienced hero, eventually shrinking inside his winged suit to fry his technology. Along the way, he successfully snagged the part from the warehouse in question and retreated on winged antback. Falcon stumbled away, annoyed and embarrassed.