Wow, I didn’t realize it had been over two months since the last time I wrote. Let’s see what I can catch you up with.
Overall, I have completed the vast majority of my training in the T-37 Tweet. Since the last I wrote, I’ve passed both my instrument checkride and my Low Level Navigation checkride! I have two more flights before I will have my Advanced Contact (aerobatics, etc) checkride, and then all that is left is formation flights! If all goes as planned, I should be “Tweet Complete” in a little less than a month! Holy cow has it gone that fast!?
We have flown some pretty exciting flights since the last email, including a cross country flight to Colorado Springs where we got to ski and snowboard at Breckenridge Ski Lodge for a day and some day trips to College Station, Abilene, and Amarillo, TX.
These are all flights that are part of our Instrument training, learning how to fly by just looking inside the cockpit at the gauges and instruments and navigating from place to place like airline pilots do, and really, it’s pretty boring. Basically you just takeoff, climb to your cruising altitude, and point at the next airport and sit there for an hour, then descend and land. Sometimes when we just fly out to the local practice areas, we get to practice different maneuvers like a wingover and aileron roll, which is pretty cool because you aren’t looking outside at all, but you know you are flying inverted at some point. For the most part, the instrument phase is pretty tough on people and usually has the most checkride failures due to all the millions of rules, techniques, and ways to fly everything that we have to fly, not to mention the extensive ground evaluation at the end of the flight that can cover anything out of numerous publications with over 1000 pages combined. Basically, the things we learn in the instrument phase we will use for the rest of our flying careers, whereas the stuff we learn in aerobatics we may not do again after training, depending on your airframe. I flew my instrument checkride sometime last month, and did pretty good, only getting four downgrades during the entire thing. A downgrade is when your grade in one category goes from an Excellent to a Good, or from a Good to a Fair. You start with all Excellents, and as you make mistakes or errors, the IP will change it to a Good, and then to a Fair, etc. There are about 50 categories you get graded on, and can pass the checkride with something like up to 20 downgraded, as long as you don’t get one or two in the same category. That being said, getting four isn’t that bad, although I could have done better. Oh well, it’s over and as they say, “A kill’s a kill.” Once the instrument portion was out of the way, the three things we had left was advanced contact, low level navigation, and formation, all of which are awesome! We had already started some of the advanced contact flights, so we made a push to get a lot of those completed.
In the advanced contact phase we have learned all the different aerobatic maneuvers and get to fly them all the time, even when we fly solo! We’ve learned the Lazy 8, Aileron Roll, Barrel Roll, Chandelle, Loop, Immelmann, Cuban 8, Cloverleaf, and Split S. My favorite ones are the Cloverleaf and Cuban 8 which are two “over the top” maneuvers. We still practice all the maneuvers we learned in the beginning because we will have to perform them on our Advanced Contact checkride that I will fly this coming week, things like spins, traffic pattern stalls, power on and off stalls, slow flight, and all the basic normal and emergency (for practice) patterns for landings. Right in the middle of these flights, we started and finished the low level navigation phase.
ENJJPT (the program I’m in) is the only pilot training program that actually has more than just one low level flight, and we actually have to pass a checkride on it at the end of the phase. We have to because the vast majority of us will be flying some kind of attack aircraft that we may have to fly the same type of flight in combat later on. Low Level Navigation is a flight where we take off and fly VFR (by looking outside and navigating ourselves by looking at where we are over the ground) to a certain point and then fly a 45 minute route from point to point at 500 feet above the ground and at 210 knots (245 miles per hour). We spend hours preparing our charts with the route we will fly, picking out certain bridges or intersections or lakes as turn points, and designating a target that we have to identify and fly over at the time we calculate. We also have to see and avoid the towers along the way, and stay away from cities and towns, and recognize what altitude we are flying at just by looking outside. The common technique is if you can see the legs on the cows, you are about 500 feet, but when you can start seeing the, um, reproductive organs, you are too low, hahahaha! These flights are by far the coolest thing we have done up to this point, and I loved flying low level navigation flights! I ended up taking my checkride just a couple weeks ago, and once again got four downgrades and passed, but definitely was a little upset because I could have scored less than that but just had bad luck with the winds that pushed me a little off course during the flight. When you plan your charts, you “spin” the winds to figure out what drift correction you must fly in order to stay on course, but if the winds are not the same as what you spun, your drift correction isn’t going to work. Oh well, a kill’s a kill. The entire low level phase only lasts 8 flights and about 2 weeks, so it went as fast as it came and I already miss it. The good thing is that once that was done, we started flying formation flights! When I said low level is the coolest thing we’ve done, well, now formation is!
Flying 3 feet from another aircraft is the most intense and most awesome thing I have ever done! It makes it even better when I know it is one of the guys in my flight, my good friend Jeff who graduated from the Air Force Academy, and knowing I am putting complete trust in him and his IP when I am flying on his wing that he isn’t going to drive us straight into the ground. And even better, halfway through the flight we switch and I take the roll as “Lead” where then he flies on my wing. We get to fly through a complete profile of maneuvers and aerobatics in formation, and then come back and do a formation approach and landing. We’ve flown four flights so far and we are getting better and better each day. We have about 15 more flights in formation before the checkride, and after that, we are done with the Tweet and will move on to the T-38 Talon! Hopefully I finish a little bit early and will be able to take some leave to come back to FL to visit everyone. I’m getting really excited about being done with Tweets, but don’t look forward to starting back at the bottem of the totem pole in knowledge and skill. I just hit my 100 flight hour mark last week and really feel like I know what I’m doing up there in the air, and feel completely comfortable flying solo and knowing so much information about the jet and stuff, but when we changeover to the new jet, we start back at square one. This is what we will do for the rest of our careers, once we feel confident in one jet, we get switched to a new one haha, at least for the next couple of years it will be that way.
Well that catches up all the flying stuff, and really, that’s the majority of what has been going on with me. The weather here lately has been really weird, one day getting up to 85 degrees and sunny, and the next being like 40 with thunderstorms and rain/hail that reminds me of a FL thunderstorm. Just earlier this weekend, my flight finally got to throw our “Solo Party” in celebration of everyone going solo a while ago. We had it pretty late because we were waiting for everyone to get back in town so we weren’t missing any of our IP’s. The solo party is where the IP’s all get to tell funny stories about the students and give them their first callsign. The students just sit there during the stories and listen, and if they talk or argue, the rule is they have to take a shot of liquor. Doesn’t sound that hard right? Well, another rule is that the stories that they IP’s tell only have to be 10% true, and some of them come up with some pretty funny and embarrassing additions! Needless to say, I sat up there and tried to keep my mouth shut, but failed twice, haha, but did get my first callsign. If you remember in my last letter, I told you about how I busted, or failed, my very first solo flight. Well, the IP’s decided this was going to stick with me for my career and made up my callsign off of it: B.U.S.T.ER. It stands for Busted Under Solo Training (ER just to make it a name). I guess it makes for a good story later on, and I like it. Haha!
Well, I think that pretty much covers the past two months, and seeing as I finished my taxes yesterday I guess I get to relax a little bit and study some formation information for the rest of the day. I hope everyone has a great weekend and enjoyed reading my letter, and hopefully ill be able to visit in May. Have a great weekend!
PS. At the end of the solo party, i was getting pushed into the pool with my camera and phone in my pockets, so I wrestled my way out of the attacker's grip and ran right into a sharp edge on the BBQ grill. Needless to say, the night ended with me going to the hospital for 5 stitches.
.jpg)
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment