A Force That Gives Us Meaning

Monday, May 23, 2011

A walk around of the KC-135

Here are a few shots of the KC-135 as we were taught how to do the walk around. I finally get to fly next month! Instrument check ride is coming up this Thursday, I'm nervous.

The tires go up to my waist!

Nose of the aircraft, you can see the boom in the back

Another angle of the tail and boom

rear of the cockpit

Standing on the side of on of the four engines

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

My New Favorite Car Commerical!

My mom told me about this and I thought I'd share. That is my plane!!! Now I just need that car :)
Click below or watch in Hi-def here

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

This past weekend I had the pleasure to be best man in one of my best friends weddings. The amazing thing is that I had only known him for about 6 months before he asked me to be his best man last summer, I was quite honored. The military has a strange way of making great freindships in a relatively small amount of time and I'm finding that those bonds stay throughout all the persistent changes (moves, deployments, ect.) in our careers.

In short, the wedding went great. The groom and all the groomsmen were in our mess dress. It was a beautiful Gothic-style Methodist church in the heart of the the downtown Twin Cities. I fulfilled my duties by making sure the groom was present for all the events and took the blame when we were a few minutes late for the rehearsal, the bride was very patient. The reception was a ton of fun and my speech went really well, there was plenty of laughter. I opened up with with this, "Hi, my name is David and I'm the best man, hold for applause." I think that softened up the crowd for some of my more corny jokes later on.

I also had the chance to go see my OLLLLLLD buddy from the days that I lived in Minnesota. He took his wife, and his two very young children down to the twin cities to pick me up and drive me back up to where we had lived back in the 90s and took me out to lunch. Then without even blinking he drove me back to the hotel downtown. You just can't beat Minnesota hospitality. I had a great time catching up with the family.

Here are a few of the photos from the trip:

John, his wife Amanda, and John's Father, and the two kidos

Oh the places we will go...

These photos were taken by Josh Lawton so I wanted to make sure he got the credits, very good photographer

Joshua Lawton // Joshua & Co. Photography
www.joshuacophotography.com 2011 JOSHUA & CO PHOTOGRAPHY

Monday, April 18, 2011

Reflections: A look back over the past couple years

Training as been really slow lately. I seem blessed by 96% on all my tests so far, yet cursed that I can't just get two more questions right and get the 100%. The plane is a beast, it takes a lot of muscle to move its old school cable and pulley system which moves the control surfaces (ailerons, elevators, rudder) are a bit archaic, but it's definitely a pilot's plane.

On a different note, a neat thing about my iPhone is that as I take pictures on it, it uses the built in GPS attach a latitude and longitude to it. Apple has taken advantage of this feature, called geotagging, and has made a cool little app that will show you all the places you have taken photos, using the camera on a google map. I bought my first iPhone back in November of 2008. Since then, I have slowly made it into my everyday point and shoot camera. You can see I've covered a fair amount of ground and I thought it would be interesting to share a couple of these locations with you.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

A little information on my soon to be new home

Okinawa, Where Service Triumphs

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

New life In Oklahoma

Things are going well here. I'm in Oklahoma now till July doing KC-135 PIQ (Pilot Initial Qualification). It's basically graduate level training so it's super laid back, nothing like what I had to do in Del Rio, but the exceptions are pretty high. Right now, I just have to show up for classes and various times and then I'm on my own to get my studying done. The first of many tests went pretty well but the a much tougher one is on it's way. My first week I was taking full advantage laid back atmosphere but now I've realized there is still a ton of work to do so I've been hitting the books pretty hard. This plane has so many redundancies as well as very intricate systems.

Two weeks ago my old housemate from Del Rio who lives in San Antonio now, along with some of my friends here, met up with me in Dallas for a proper 25th birthday celebration. It was a solid weekend, one of the best birthday's I've had.

That's all for now, I just got back from a simulator from 11pm till 1am, talk about the swing shift!

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Mexico Dayzzz

Well after this point in time we started so many different activities that I got way behind in my journal and didn't write anymore in it. So to get caught up quickly, I'm just going to post my photos from the trip. I have other, more current things to write about anyway! here we go!