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...

Soloed the T-6!

This was a fairly eventful week, full of ups and downs (luckily ending on a high). It started off slow being weathered out on Monday, then had a really good flight on Tuesday to make up for the not good flight on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I felt like the procedures in the landing environment really started to become like second nature to me and my landings were really looking more than just "safe", they started to be consistently good. Then on Wednesday I had the chance to solo aircraft (mission C4201), all I had to do was land the plane three times and do a couple other maneuvers with the instructor before he hopped out and sent me on my way.

As you can imagine, putting a student in a plane all by himself after only 12 or 13 flights can be very dangerous if the student isn't completely ready. It is very important the student gives the instructor a "warm, fuzzy feeling" because he is the guy who will get in trouble if anything bad were to happen and of course he doesn't want you to get hurt, or damage the aircraft. I was on my last landing flying over the field at 2,100 ft getting ready to make my second to last turn before getting lined up for my final approach to land and there was someone behind me doing a "straight-in approach" (which creates a traffic conflict if I were to do that turn). Since you can't see behind you, the pilot has to be able to make a mental image of all the other aircraft just based off of the required radio calls/position reports. Well, to make a long story short I tried to make that turn with him behind me and the IP had to take the controls and do something else. Back on the ground, the IP debriefed me, went over the procedures to make sure I understood them, told me to go home and chair-fly and come with my game tomorrow.

That night of course I chair flew like crazy with Matt helping me by acting like traffic over the radios and I had to keep track of all the other aircraft while pretending to fly the jet in detail. Thursday came and I was the first flight of the morning. The weather was marginal but my IP told the supervisor we would we would go up and do a weather report when we first took off. We reported cloud ceilings of 5,500 ft, just enough for what I needed to do. I took the plane around and landed three times, one time I landed so smoothly that the instructor couldn't even tell if we had touched down! I was feeling good when he told me to come to a complete stop on the third landing. We taxied off the runway and parked on the parking ramp. The instructor jumped out, took off his Velcro name tag with his wings, took my wingless name tag and pulled it off and continued to punch on his name tag on my flight suit, upside down, and put my tag on upside down on his flight suit. As he was putting it on he said, "It's bad luck to be in a plane without a pair of wings, so I'm loaning you mine today!" At that point, My call sign on the radio went from "Panther 1-4" our squadron call sign, to "Pogo 1-4" because they instructors say we usually look like pogo-sticks bouncing around on the runway when we land. Also, that lets everyone know that a new solo is in pattern (so look out!).

The solo was great, the traffic was mellow enough that I got to do two "closed" turn which you can see on the in video and you got to do some pretty fun turning/climbing. The video quality is terrible because it was zoomed in using the "digital zoom", not the lens zoom. Basically. in the video you can see me coming in for my second landing, touchdown and take off right away (called a "touch and go"), then might be able to hear my radio call saying, "Pogo 1-4, request closed", shortly after you hear "closed approved". Right after that you see the little black pixels that are my plane become a silhouette of my plane with wings perpendicular to the ground. After I roll out of the turn I say, "Pogo 1-4, closed downwind" and say continue to the point where I make my final turn to line up with the runway to say "Pogo 1-4, [landing] gear down".


On Friday I had a instrument simulator and my third to last Phase II academic test! I was pretty happy to get it out of the way since it is the second to hardest test in the program, unfortunately we had a few failures in the class. I didn't get a 100 but passed and was more than happy for that.

That night we went to the town of Uvalde to hear some Texas country at a tavern, there were three other bands who opened up for Wade Bowen. I had never heard of him before that but he was really good. Tonight, our class sponsors bought us tickets to the annual "Wild Game Dinner" where wild dove, deer, wild hog and other wild game will be served while various prizes such as 4-wheelers, rifles, guns, and tickets for Dallas Cowboys games are raffled off. Who knows, maybe I'll leave with a shot-gun tonight???

Wow, after reading that last paragraph, I feel super Texan... Next thing you know maybe I'll be signing up to be in the rodeo!