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.