Dollar Ride and MWS Day

So on Friday I had my first ride in the T-6, is was amazing. Having that extra thousand horsepower (than my last plane) sure makes a difference. The instructor pilot I few with was a first lieutenant who was probably at most 3 years older than me. We call the first ride a "dollar ride" because you really don't get to fly the entire time as he is mostly just showing you everything you have been practicing in the simulators and the books. In return for his "chauffeur services", it is tradition to give him a dollar for flying you around. Since the IP doesn't just want another dollar, you are expected to do something creative. I am thinking about trying to get a crutch, spray paint it gold and wrap a dollar around the arm pad with a note saying, "Thanks for being my crutch". But I don't know who is just going to have a crutch laying around so we'll have to figure something out.

As far as the ride itself, yes Mom I did go upside down, and yes, I was wearing a helmet. The weather was beautiful, not too hot, not too cold, calm winds and clear for a million as far as clouds. The airplane was basicly brand new from the factory and had only been flown for a total of 85 hours. When I opened the canopy, a fresh "new car" smell flew into my nostrils. All the gauges, switches were shiny and the exterior hadn't even been needed to be washed yet.

We took off a little late because a C-130 had just flown in for MWS (Major Weapon Systems) Day that was on Saturday and they had accidentally taxied down a taxi way that wasn't big enough for them so they had to go down our runway instead. As soon as we got off the runway you could feel the immense amounts of torque from the propeller trying to roll the plane to the left and requiring a BUNCH of right rudder. Luckily, this is also the first plane that has rudder trim and didn't have to hold it in the whole flight to maintain a straight flight path.

Since the first portion of phase two is focusing on Contact flight, or flying visually as opposed to mainly just flying off the instruments, he flew out to the auxiliary field and pointed out the visual references since the simulator just has satellite imagery for the ground and doesn't do that great of a job of showing you all the details and changes. After we got out to the other field, called WIZRD (pronounced wizard). He showed how the traffic flow worked once and then said, "You have the aircraft, lets do that again". I said "I have the aircraft", and shook the control stick to let him know that I have positive control and he could let go. I then took the plane around the ground track and landed it. As soon as the two main wheels touched the ground, I punched the throttle back to "Full" and took off again, doing what is called, a touch-and-go. We basically do this to reduce the amount of time it takes to come to a complete stop, taxi off the runway, taxi back on the runway, and take off again.

Then we flew out to the MOA, or military open area, where we do all our maneuvers. Once we got up there, he said again, "You have the aircraft, do whatever you want". We were at 10,000 feet, which is the low MOA, the one above me went up to 22,000 feet. From the low MOA we could see clear in the Mexico for hundreds of miles and see the Rio Grande as the only way on knowing I was about to enter another sovereign nation with a military aircraft, which just doesn't sound like a good idea.

The throttle is actually computer driven and when you are moving it, you are actually just "asking" the computer to give you more power but its job is to make sure you don't exceed any limited for the turbine. I played around with that for a while, trying to get certain torque settings, then found myself in full throttle, decided I liked the feeling of that and pitched the nose about 10 degrees high and shoved the stick to the right till I was looking "up" at the ground. I started chuckling and flipped it back upright and leveled off. Then the IP asked me how my stomach was feeling, surprisingly, I was feeling really good and then told me get get up to about 220 knots and pull the stick back to 30 degrees nose high. I did as he said and then performed a loop!

Here is a link to a video that shows kinda what was going on from my the pilots view. Notice when the ground is seen he is going vertical on the way to inverted flight. It doesn't really show what the plane is doing very well though.

Yesterday was WMS Day where they had a really good show of all of the aircraft that the AF has been handing out at graduation. They had 3 F-15s, two F-16s, a C-130, a C-17 (the photos are the inside of the C-17), and they had two of the new Special Forces planes the U-28 and the PC-12, which have a pretty cool mission. They also had two UAV pilots come talk to us from Nevada and two U-2 pilots from a base in the Sacramento area come and give a presentation.

Well, I'm off to study!