A Return from Absence

Well, it's been a few months since I have even had time to think about this blog. I thought that when I graduated, I would have even more time for things like writing on this blog. I guess it just tells you how different things can be from how you imagine them. Since my last blog, I completed UPT about a week before I "dropped" and found out that I will be moving to Japan to fly the KC-135 at Kadena. I'm really excited about the assignment as it was my first choice aircraft and my second choice location (after hawaii). After that I had UPT graduation. That was a really nice time for me as my parents, two of my uncles, and one of my aunts came out for the event. I hadn't seen my parents in about a year and a half, which was a bit too long. Laughlin did a nice job of making it a worthwhile event for everyone that attended.

The weekend after, Mom and I flew out to visit my Uncle, Aunt and cousin for a few days. It had been about 10 years since I had seen them! It was nice to be able to use of the leave I had been accumulating over the past year and a half.

Two days after returning from a really nice visit with my relatives, I went out to Washington State (Spokane area) for a month of water survival and wilderness survival training. The young enlisted two-stripers where nothing short of grizzly mountain men, yet, donning the same uniform that the rest of the Air Force wore. They were very skilled at making mountain men/women out of us. It was cold, wet and at sometimes, just outright miserable. By the time I left that state, there was over 2 feet of snow on the ground and over a month later, my big toes are still numb from the wet and cold conditions.

After that I've undertaken the monumental task of out-processing my current base for the next one, in Japan. There are multiple checklists that had to be accomlished and it seems like the base leadership is always looking for ways to keep us busy on top of all this paperwork. The difficult part is that I'm actually not going to Japan right away. I'll be doing a TDY (temporary duty for the non-military types) en route to Japan. I'll be up in Altus, Oklahoma for 5 months learning how to fly the best that is the KC-135. From what I've heard, it will not be like UPT at all and is much more of a "big boy" program in a sense that they don't make you sit in the classroom for 12 hours a day and study. It's a much more relaxed pace as well. Even though Oklahoma isn't the most exciting place, I've got the attitude that if I can make a blast out of Del Rio, I can make any other location a blast too, some places just need a little more work put into them than other locations.

Well, I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and New Years! I will try to keep writing in this when I get the chance as well as add some photos from christmas and some of the other said events.

5 flights left!

At this point in time, I am able to count my remaining flights with just one hand! I now only have 5 flights left and should be done with the UPT (Undergraduate Pilot Training) in as little as a week from today! This is assuming all goes well and I don't try to do anything dumb in the airplane. Two weeks from Friday, I will "drop" my next assignment which includes finding out where I'll be going and what airframe I'll be flying. Currently, I'm trying to get outside of the 48 states. I know I'll be happy flying whatever airframe I get and know I'll enjoy the mission, so pretty much as this point, I can't loose, I win no matter what.

My first choice (today at least) is the C-21 to Ramstein AB, in Germany. After that I'd like KC-135s to Hawaii, England, Japan, and then the domestic places. The reason why I'm so anxious to get out of the 48 is because I don't have any dependents so I don't need to worry about finding a good school for children and I want to see as much of the world that I can while I'm still young. All of this is also dependent on what is simply available for our individual drop. So I'll have to just do the best I can and see what happens...

Time is flying by... No pun intended

Alright I've been slacking in the update department again. I've finally got some time after a busy busy month. I've had big events (a flight or simulator) everyday workday except three for all of August. Last week was my Navigation check ride, basically the biggest exam of pilot training for those not familiar with the curriculum. I passed and was able to take a deep breath, then get in the jet the next day and do something totally different, formation flying. It's quite a bit different from from T-6 formation and it makes a lot more sense than how we did it in T-6s. T-6s felt like I was putting an air show on for nobody, here in the T-1, its more about mutual support and maximizing the potential of the jet. We are actually doing it up about 20,000 feet at the moment, but this is just for training to do it 500 feet above the ground in a week or two where we will be simulating going undetected into hostile territory to make an air drop. It should be pretty sweet. Last month we took our "hero shot" photos, here it is:

 Oh yea, August 25th I made 1st Lt :)

Starting to feel like a real flyer

So I haven't been totally on top of this blog lately. I'm going to try my best to get back with it and keep whoever still checks the site out updated and little more frequently.

Time here is quickly coming to to a end, we are graduating October 21st!  That's two months and three weeks! I'm in charge of putting all the graduation events together for our class which is kind of a joke because they have a graduation every three weeks so I pretty much just found out who the senior class banquet officer was and asked what they were doing. Everything has to be through the Officer's Club on base so there isn't really too many choices.

I've been flying all over Texas this month. It's really a big, beautiful state. We've been doing a lot of low levels which are military training routes that are flown at 500ft above the ground. I've flown through the mountains of Big Bend National Park and flown routes through the wind farms of San Angelo and Abilene. I'm really enjoying beening able to look out the windows and take a lot of photos on my little iPhone camera when I'm sitting in the jump seat. We normally have 1 instructor and 2 students in the jet. When we take the jet out, we do two student sorties so we swap seats halfway through if we are stopping anywhere for lunch. So when you sit the jump seat you actually get to look around.

Well I'm going on a "cross country" mission tomorrow. I'll be boing to be in Oklahoma tomorrow and staying at Tinker for the night. I've got to go plan for it! Hope everyone is doing well. I'll try to write again later this week.

Quick update

Hey, haven't written on here in a while but wanted to let you know really quick what's going on. This week I've been going on out-and-backs. These sorties include me, an instructor, and another student going out to two other airports, stopping at the second one for a meal, then having the other student fly back. Yesterday we went out to Lubbock, Tx for Italian, today we went to Ft Worth for sushi. Tomorrow I'm flying down the boarder along the Rio Grande till it opens up to meet the Gulf. Then I'm flying up the coast to Corpus Christi to catch a bite to eat (I'm in a cajan mood because I just had sushi today)... All in a day's "work"...

Happy 4th of July!

Here's a clever commercial if you haven't seen it already...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMRMW1FXSHw

All in a morning's work

So this morning I planned our flight out to El Paso, Tx, however, the instructor wanted to go to Roswell, NM (about a 7 hour drive away)... About 50 miles out from Roswell we got the current weather and it was too low to do the training we wanted to accomplish. Then we diverted up to Amarillo, Tx ( a 4 hour drive), did our training, then flew from Amarillo back to Del Rio (an 8 hour drive)... We did 19 hours of driving in about 3 hours of flying. Our ground speed was about 576 MPH... Love this plane!

First impressions of the 86th Flying Training Squadron

Well, I've been in the new squadron for exactly a week today and so far I'm really enjoying it. So far I've just been learning about the various systems of the T-1, and boy does she have quite a few systems. Not to mention the redundancy has all been meticulously designed so that I one thing goes out, there are 1 or two other systems ready to pick up its slack and make the situation more bearable. The most obvious of these is having twin engines. The main reason why none of the large aircraft have ejection seats (except the B-52) is due to the almost impossible odds that all of your engines are going to go out in addition to the ability to fly and land only using one engine (which we will be practicing quite a bit).

Yesterday, I had the systems 1 test which covered the fuel system, the engines, and the warning system. I missed one super easy question wrong because I was over-thinking about it. The systems 2 test will be on Friday and is mostly covering the beastly electric system. Because the plane has two jets, it also has two generators so you can almost learn one side and have a good feeling for the other one.

Below is my new flight patch. I've left Falcons flight when I left T-6s and now I'm in Kodiaks flight. I haven't asked to confirm, but I'm pretty sure the patch is making fun of the T-38 squadron (the fighter jocks). The T-38s assigned here are the bulls, and the patch shows the bear riding a mechanical bull. I'll let you interpret that as you wish but the two squadrons are rivals and constantly make fun of each other all the time.This patch is not to be confused with our "class" patch that we made. We are just assigned to K Flight for the duration of T-1s, like I was in Irish flight and Falcons flight in T-6s. Hope that made some sort of sense but its kinda tough to explain.

Solo Certificate

As you know, yesterday was our last day in T-6s, there was a bunch of odds and ends both the students and the instructors had to finish up. Among other things, one of them was handing out the solo certificates. I've posted a scan of the one they gave to me as I find it fairly humorous.

T-1s it is!

Hey just wanted to let my readers know that I tracked T-1s the Tactical/Strategic airlift and refueling track. You can read about it in my previous blog, see a photo and read about it if you click the Wikipedia link down there too!

I had my first day today and so far is seems pretty sweet. It flys much faster, higher, and longer than the T-6!

T-6 Complete!

So I've been slacking as far as updating this blog, but I promise where I've been slacking on the writing, I've been picking up in the flying. As of Friday, I'm all done with the T-6A Texan II which is what Phase II of the three phases is all about. Next up is Phase III, the final portion of pilot training before getting to pin on the pilot wings.

From here you have a "track" ceremony where you find out which of the four aircraft you go onto next. I've put down UH-1s (AKA Huey) first on my list which is a helicopter, I put T-1 Jayhawk second. T-1s are the airlift/tanker trainer which about 80% of the students will go to. Out of my class of 25, only 1 or at most 2 people will track to UH-1s, so I'm fairly certain I'll be going T-1s. The other two choices are T-38s, which usually tracks to fighters/bombers and T-44s which goes exclusively to C-130s. They were my third and fourth choices respectively.

If I were to go to T-1s, there would be no move for me as we have T-1s and T-38s here at Laughlin. If however, I do get UH-1s, I would be moving to Fort Rucker, Alabama where I would be training with the Army for the next 6 months.


Here's some photos and info of the top two choices:

UH-1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UH-1_Iroquois

T-1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-1_Jayhawk

Having finished on Friday and not starting Phase III till Wednesday, I was able to enjoy the weekend without my conscious tell me I should be studying. Friday night I watched a movie with a few of the guys at the house. Then Saturday morning I took an ATV class on base that my good friend who works at the civil engineering squadron told me about. It was super fun! The first two hours were learning about the 4 wheelers and riding them around a track. Then after that we did practical "training" and went raging around the base, going into the brush, finding big mud puddles and seeing how much mud we could spay on each other. After that I went home, took a shower, and drove into town to go to a class BBQ/skeet shoot. The local business owners take turns sponsoring our class and throw events like this for us. Sunday afternoon Matt and I took out the jet skis with some other friends and had a BBQ at the lake.

I'll make another post tomorrow saying what a tracked! Hope everyone is doing well and feel free to drop me an email/call to say hi! 

Happy 30th Wedding Aniversary Mom and Dad!

Congratulations to my Mom and Dad who have been married for 30 years today :)

T-6 Sim Complete!

Just a quick update, they  have been double turning me like crazy this week an already have 5 events done and have another 2 flights tomorrow. One of the flights is my second to last instrument ride before my instrument check ride, the other flight is my first "low level" flight that is only 500 ft above the ground at 210 knots. It's supposed to simulate going under the radar if you needed to sneak in somewhere undetected.

Today I had my last T-6 simulator which I feel like is a pretty big deal since I'm also done with academics so the only events I have left are flights, 23 of them as of the end of today. If both of my scheduled flights happen tomorrow, I'll be down to 21! I feel like a little kid counting down the days till his birthday.

Washbacks, Birthday, Cross-Country flight and Instrument Checkride

Well I think I'm over due for an update for my dear readers. Here's whats new...

The first thing is that I'm no longer in Irish flight and no longer in class 10-15. I'm now in 11-01 (which means I'm the first class of fiscal year 2011 to graduate). So basically my whole time line gets pushed back 3 weeks which is just about perfect because I was about 20 days behind due to the weather. Now I'm about a week ahead of the time line which takes a little stress off if I don't do an event everyday.

Back on the 19th, it was my birthday and two of my best friends from the college days in Davis came out from California as well as my brother Nate, and my girlfriend Saima came out to Austin for the weekend. We also met up with our friends Kamni, Karan, and Vinni, who live in Austin. They did an awesome job of showing Nate, Ben, and Javier a great time, Austin-style, before I came out. My roommate Matt came up along with another Matt from my class and his girlfriend Stephanie. Luckily the weather wasn't that great... I say that because it was scheduled to be a flying Saturday and I wouldn't have been able to make the drive out to see everyone that had flown out till late Saturday night. Leadership had decided that with the wash back system and the forecast of bad weather, they had just decided to cancel it. I had a great time seeing everyone and showing the Californians the Texas lifestyle. Here's a few of the photos of Nate and I(for Mom)...

After that weekend, I had my cross-country trip. Although I would have liked to fly out to Santa Barbra to meet up with my Mom and Dad, weather pretty much kept us socked in the South West so I just decided to do a Texas Tour. On the 26th of February we flew out north to Abilene regional to get some of Susan's Texan BBQ for a late lunch. Then my instructor and I flew back at night out to San Antonio International and got some sushi on the River Walk downtown and stayed at the Marriott there as well. The next morning we took off, climbed up to flight level 240 (24,000 ft MSL) and flew out east to Lake Charles Louisiana for some Po' Boy sandwiches and red beans and rice. After that we flew using visual flight rules at 4,500 ft over the Gulf just hugging the coast down till we got to Corpus Christi and got some great seafood and stayed at the Omni hotel downtown there. We woke up early that day to fly out to College Station, home of Texas A and M, where we got a famous 'Freebirds' burrito. They actually gave the the food for free when we gave them our flight patches. I guess many of the places collect them for discounts, or in this case, free food :)

The trip was a lot of fun, but for as much fun as we had, it was about four times the amount of work. My IP told me after the trip he appreciated me being professional and treating it like a business trip, and not a vacation. There are countless stories of students getting in a lot of trouble... mostly with alcohol incidents. Here's a photo from Corpus Christi...

With the busy weekend in Austin and a super busy weekend flying around having this weekend to just lounge around, change the oil, get some groceries back in the fridge, and watch a couple movies was exactly what I wanted.

This week I have two simulators and three flights to get done before going to my third of the four check rides in the T-6. This is going to be my instrument check ride where I fly out to a local airfield and shoot an instrument approach blindfolded only being able to use my gauges to safely position the plane for a safe landing.

After this check ride, I'll be moving on to the final stage of Phase Two, formation where we fly about 10 feet away from each other. In fact its so close to the other plane you can feel the vibrations coming from the other airplane right next to you.

Right now I've got 35 working days left with 28 events left, meaning if I did one perday for the rest next 28 days, I'll be done about a week early!

That's all for now hope to update this next weekend and let you know how the check ride is looking.

All Weathered Out...

Although pilot training base locations are chosen for optimal flying weather all year long, this winter has been the exception. We have had dismal weather for most of December and January. It's really wacky because Monday-Friday has been consistently fogy with low cloud decks and then Saturday and Sunday come and the weather is beautiful, as it was yesterday and today. Hopefully we will be able to get caught up quickly to avoid working more weekends than needed. So far I've only had 24 rides, still another 27 to go plus some simulators. Below is scan of the flights and some of the sims that are involved in the current phase. The highlighted items have been completed.

A couple weeks ago I had my first big in-flight test. The first check ride, called Mid-Phase Contact, is the newest of the four T-6 check rides where you must show that you are safe enough to take the plane by yourself out 40 miles east of the base, be able to perform aerobatic maneuvers safely and safely recover the plane back at base. I passed the ride although I didn't get the best of grades by any means.

This week, weather permitting, I will be having my Final Contact check ride. This ride isn't much different from the Mid-Phase check ride except that we have new maneuvers which include the: Barrel Roll, Immelman, Cloverleaf, Cuban 8, Lazy 8, and the Chandelle. Aerobatics really improve your trust with the aircraft and you really know how to get a lot more performance out of the plane once you have learned them. Plus, once you can do it right and get the guy in the back seat to stop talking because you pull too many G's, it can be really fun. Also, Wednesday is our last T-6 academic test. Then we will be T-6 academic complete! After that, a few more weeks and we will be simulator complete, then it will just be formation flying:)

This week is our night-flying week! This means that we start at about 1400 in the afternoon and get out about 0200 in the (morning)night if they keep us for all twelve hours. I did the simulator, which is the same thing as the flight and it was pretty boring actually. I'm sure the stars will be great though. I'm kinda hoping for a power outage over Mexico because I think that would look awesome from 9,000 ft. Just a momentary one because we don't want anymore mayhem over there, right?

Besides the check ride and night-flying this week. February 12-16 is scheduled to be my cross-country trip and I maybe planning a stop to a destination near you! Nothing is final yet but I'm hoping to fly to California to see family since it looks like once I go to the next phase of training I won't be allowed to leave Del Rio for 6 months :( ... There is another guy in my class from San Mateo and two others from San Diego so it's possible to go North or South. Mom and Dad, what do you think about a trip down South? The reason why I would rather stay with another student is if I did fly somewhere near home, my instructor would probably not want to hang out with all of us and there would be no other instructors to hang out with. If we go as a group, the students can hang out and the instructors can hang out and each have there fun.

Anyway, that's what's on the horizon for now...