Instrument Quailification Check Ride AND a trip back home!

Hope all of you are doing well. Last Thursday I had my first checkride in the KC-135. After 4 months of studying and simulators and about two weeks of stressing over it, I passed with a Q1, no downgrades. You can only get a Q1,Q2, or Q3 with Q3 being a fail and Q2 meaning you passed, but additional training is required. This is arguably the most important check ride I've had so far due to the fact that I am no longer a student and this checkride is the first that included a Form 8, which stays with you for the remainder of your air force career and is looked at by the airlines if you ever apply there. From what I've been told, one Q3 on a checkride and that will keep you from getting an airline job. Although I don't have any plans to join the airlines at this moment, I would like to keep my options open and keep my squadron in Japan from thinking I'm a slack-nasty before I even get out there, so a Q1 was a great way to start my non-student pilot career.

The checkride was very big picture and the check pilot told us so. In the simulator, he acted as a neutral copilot, who needed some prompting but just wanted you to be directive so that he knew that you knew you need to perform whatever the action you needed to do was.

After the debrief, I went and had a beer with my Chilean co-workers and went a laid out at the pool across the street for an hour to let it all soak in with a little sunshine on top:) I went back to my room and packed my bags for the flight I had booked right before going to bed Wednesday night back to the Bay Area to see my mama who was recovering from a procedure and was in a lot of pain. Friday morning I took the first flight to SFO from DFW. I had originally planned to drive down to Austin to see some good friends one last time before I left the country, but Mom comes first!

It was very good to be home, Mom quickly recovered and felt so good that she insists that she made one of her famous chocolate cakes, from scratch of course.... Who was I to refuse!?! My two best buddy's from college came up and we had a great dinner at my old work, Central Market on Saturday night. The menu always features the freshest local ingredients and service was wonderful. Of course, I also had to go in for my Super Burrito from the local Mexican restaurant, Mi Pueblo. And no visit home is complete without a trip to Hallie's Dinner for breakfast, I went twice! Now that I think of it, I sure did do a lot of eating this trip.... better go running.

Sunday I went to church with the family and the friends that stayed for the night after dinner downtown. Dad's sermons are the best. After they departed, I went to Pt Reyes National Seashore. The drive was almost as good as the destination, all I needed was a convertible and I would have just kept driving up and down the coast.


Mi Pueblo's Super Burrito

 Small vineyard on the way North from San Fran

 The best backyard in town!

 Some guys working in the garden

 Mom, Nate, and I at grandpa's place

 Grandpa and I... I got him to smile!

 Drive out to the coast

 Pt Reyes National Seashore

 The light house at Pt Reyes. You can see whales migrate from here

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

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

Minneapolis Wedding

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

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

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

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

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.

A little information on my soon to be new home

Okinawa, Where Service Triumphs

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!