Tweets On Steroids

I think that's a good way to put how the initial couple months of T-38's is going to be...Tweets on steroids. We have to learn a new plane again, but this time there's less time before flying starts. A typical day so far has been about 12 hours full of academics, sims and flights with 30 minutes of eating dinner and two to three hours of studying before bed...but it's awesome and wouldn't want to be doing anything else! I get a chance to exercise in the sometimes too. As you know, class and sims started right away getting us prepared for our first flights, and those took place this past Thursday and Friday. The sims are a really good representation of the actual plane (minus the movement), so it's been very helpful in getting us up to speed. There are three that have 180 degrees of view and three with just a flat screen in front of you.

After a week and half of academics and sims, we were off to Holloman AFB for the centrifuge. It wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be, but it was still pretty painful. The tumbling sensation along with the hi g's were the main factors making you feel weird. G's just means how much of an increase in body weight you feel. 7g's would be seven times your body weight, so for me that's about 1400 lbs. Dang! We did have a G-suit which increases g tolerance by about 1g. The purpose of the fuge is to make sure our bodies can handle the g forces of the next aircraft and give a chance to practice our g-strain (breathing techniques under high g loads). We had to do five profiles as follows:

Profile #1: a gradual increase to 4g's for 40 seconds (to warm up)
Profile #2: a slightly rapid increase to 5g's for 40 seconds
Profile #3: a rapid (about 1 second) increase to 6g's for 30 seconds
Profile #4: a rapid increase to 7.5 g's for 15 seconds
Profile #5: a rapid increase to 6g's while looking back over your right shoulder

The 6g's for 30 seconds was the hardest due to air hunger at about 20 seconds...you can't just relax and take a deep breath. Anyway, the whole thing took about 10 minutes per person, so we were out of there pretty quick with only five of us. We did have some time to relax after the fuge, so checked out some of the local dunes and were even able to fly a Stealth Fighter (F-117) sim and see a jet.



We got our new nametages the other day, which we're not going to wear until we solo...hopefully in a couple weeks. I'm in Falcon flight with the callsign of Pistol now instead of Skunk. My first couple rides were great...it's hard to explain a first ride in a supersonic jet! It's a total kick in the rear compared to the T-37. The training syllabus had us in the backseat for the first two rides, but we were still able to do the takeoff and even fly out the the practice area.

After some basic maneuvers, we had a little fun with loops and some other acrobatics. Just as an example, the entry parameters for a loop are 500 knots and at least 8,000-10,000 ft of usable airspace above you. It's a lot different since we're moving so fast. On our way back to the pattern, my IP took the jet so he could show me some of the ground references used and just so I could get a feel for how it all works. I didn't mind, it gave me a chance to take in the sites while flying in the pattern at 300 knots! My next ride I'm in the front seat and we'll start the contact phase of training. Speaking of all that I need to return to the books. I have a test and two flights tomorrow.