Wow, it’s been a few months since I was able to sit down and write what we have been up to out here in Texas! Hopefully everyone is doing well and had fun during the holidays and new years!
Basically, we have dove head first into flying and have about 45-50 hours in the jet so far up to this point! We fly once or twice a day, weather permitting, and have even gotten to solo the jet a few times already! My initial solo was back in December, on the last Friday before we all got released for Christmas break. It was pretty damn fun, even though I got a “surface to air missile” from the IP’s who control the runway we use. On your initial solo, you have to fly for about 45 minutes with an IP, and he just makes sure you are safe enough to go up alone, and then you land and drop him off, taxi back around and take off to fly around the pattern until you have to land from being low on fuel. It was one of the best and worst days in pilot training so far, because I made a mistake on one of my patterns that resulted in getting told to “go around” from the controller during one of my landings and then they instructed me to land immediately. I “busted” my initial solo! Yikes, this was not good! Haha, I can laugh about it now, and I know it will make for a good story later, but it sucked then and I definitely learned some pretty important things.
Since then, I have gotten to go solo a few more times out to fly around the practice areas doing a few of the maneuvers we have learned like loops and aileron rolls! It is the GREATEST feeling in the world being up there alone, with no IP sitting next to you talking your ear off telling you everything you could be doing better! Ha ha ha, it really makes it so much easier to concentrate on flying and paying attention to what is going on and keeping your SA (situational awareness) up when you are solo. I have 3 solo hours so far, and will be getting more this coming week to practice all the advanced aerobatic maneuvers we learned last week. When I go, I get to do loops, aileron rolls, barrel rolls, chandelles, split S’s, lazy eights, Cuban eights, Immelmanns, and cloverleaf’s! It’s going to be amazing!
We have also gone through almost the entire academics portion of the training for the T-37. We went though classes for basic and advanced instruments, navigation, low level navigation, and the only class we have left is aviation weather. This past test, low level nav, gave five of us problems though, resulting in us going through a remediation class and having to take the test again. It sucked, but we all passed the second time around and everything is ok.
This past Monday, 5 Feb 06, I finally got to complete the first stage of training by passing my first checkride. During the T-37 phase, we have 5 checkrides that we must pass to move on to the next phase of flying. They are contact, instrument, formation, low level, and advanced contact. Each of them consist of a preflight brief with a Check Section Instructor Pilot for an hour and fifteen minutes where they go over the rules and objectives, and then you go out and fly with them for an hour and a half or so doing all the maneuvers, patterns, landings, etc. that we have been doing for the past few months during those flights. When you get back, you go through about 2 more hours of a ground evaluation that consists of your flight debrief, general knowledge questions, emergency procedure questions, discussion about the different systems of the aircraft, spins, ejection, local procedures, rules, and all that fun stuff. It takes about a total of 5-6 hours to go through the entire checkride and is a huge part of the training, so everybody is fairly nervous going into it. I was originally scheduled to do my checkride about two weeks ago, but we had some bad weather and they kept getting pushed back, and then the radar at the ATC building was having problems, so it did give me extra time to study which was nice.
Now that the first checkride is done, we get to move on to advanced contact (aerobatics) and more instrument flight. We are beginning to plan our first cross country trips that we will be flying the 23-25th of Feb. As of right now, we are planning on flying up to Amarillo, TX, and then on the Colorado Spring, CO. We will leave on a Friday morning, fly up to Amarillo and do a few approaches into the airport, get gas, and then continue to CO. Once we get there we will land at Peterson AFB and are planning on renting a car and driving up to the mountains to go snowboarding! There are about 8 students all planning the same trip and all the IP’s that are going with us are really excited about skiing so it should be a lot of fun!
Enough about flying, now for some personal stuff. Let’s see, I spent thanksgiving with friends here, eating dinner with Greg, Jill, Mike, and Amy. We only had 2 days off, so there really wasn’t enough time to get a flight out of town which stunk, but I enjoyed the time off and all the food. For Christmas, I flew up to Seattle and spent 10 days up there with the family, relaxing, eating lots of cookies (thanks mom!), going snowboarding, and vegging out on the couch! It was a much needed break and I did get dad to help me with some approach plate stuff (instrument approach procedures into an airport). It was really nice seeing everyone and hanging out with them, and wish I could have gone back to FL to see all the family back there too. I hope everyone had as good a break as I did!
Once I got back here, we started flying again and have been going ever since. Mom and Dad came into town for my birthday in January, which was really nice and I enjoyed. It snows every once in a while here, which is weird for me and I realized my car does not like the cold weather! Haha I was having a couple of problems with it and actually started thinking about trading it in for a new used one, but, in the end I took it to a repair shop and got it fixed, trying to make it last till the end of pilot training. I haven’t done much biking lately, seeing as its freezing out a lot and the rain made the trails pretty muddy. We don’t get very much time at all to go to the gym either, which is pretty sad, but we spend 12 hours a day in the flight room and when we get off, all I want to do is relax, eat, and then have to study till I go to bed. I usually have maybe 3 hours to myself at home to take care of everything before I need to get to sleep. Especially flying twice a day which really wears you out!
Overall, I love the flying portion of training, and love the aerobatics and instrument flights! I can’t wait to go cross country, and want to solo again bad! Mike and Greg and Matt, all from ERAU, are doing well and all of them passed their checkrides as well, so that’s good. Mike was pretty upset last weekend that the Bears lost though, haha, but great job Colts!
The long days are rough, intense, and it is definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
This is the design of our class patch we had made, if you don't get it, ask a teenage or early 20's male...hahaha
No comments:
Post a Comment