Moving Right Along

I tell you what, the tempo has picked up the past couple weeks! We've still been having great weather, and it's made for some awesome flying. The last time I updated the site, I was coming up on my first checkride, Midphase. The day before the checkride we were assigned our check pilot. Knowing who I was going to fly with allowed me to scan through critiques students wrote up from past checkrides. I read through that info and learned as much as I could about the pilot I would be flying with.

Thursday of that week was the big day, and overall it went well. Of course, I'm kinda ticked at myself because I had flown better previously, but it's all good. It was a little tense before we flew for a couple reasons. To keep it kind of simple, the navigation aids on the ground that tell us where we're at in the Military Operations Area (MOA) while we practice decided to go down about an hour before I was supposed to check. When this happens, there's a whole different procedure for keeping track of where you're at in the air. Of course, I had never flown with these different procedures so I tried to cram them into my head about 20 minutes before brief time. Crazy stuff...but thankfully as we were stepping to the jet the nav aids I was used to working came back on line! The second reason, well it was my first checkride ever and I had those pregame jitters going on.

Finally we got to our jet, and were off. I had everything all nice and planned out how I wanted it to go, but checkrides rarely go as planned. =) The pattern was very full, and some of the requirements (like normal and single engine patterns and landings) I wanted to get out of the way right off the bat in the pattern had to wait until we returned from the MOA. The big thing the check pilot was looking for was if I could safely fly out to the practice area, keep myself in the area assigned and the fly safely back. An area is defined by a min and max altitude, and two radials off of a specific nav aid. The area work all went great, and soon I was requesting recovery to the base. The recovery radio call goes like this, "Columbus approach, Ripsaw 35 (that was the check pilot's call sign) request recovery Marble, with Bravo." That all went fine and we were soon back in the pattern to finish a couple things I didn't get a chance to do earlier. Once the flying was over I had a ground evaluation to see if I've been keeping up and learning my stuff. After about 20 minutes or so of questioning and all, it was over and I came away with a 4 downgrade good...or a 4G. I was pretty happy with that, but I'm definitely shooting for better Monday!

After a long and tiring week, it was time to relax a little bit down in Destin Beach, FL! Eglin AFB was having an airshow, so a couple of us took of Friday after we left the flightline. My college roommate's parents live right there by the base and beach, and they allowed us to stay there for a couple nights. It was a great time to just relax. Saturday morning we got up for a run, had breakfast and then headed out on the boat for a while. Their house is on a bay off of the Gulf, so we cruised out in the the Gulf of Mexico for a bit and soaked up some rays. We got back to the house around 1100 and then headed to the base to check out the planes and catch the Thunderbirds later in the day. After being down there for the weekend, I don't think I'd have much of a problem with flying F-15C's there at Eglin...it's a great base and right by the beach! Come to think if it, that would be no problem at all!
With Midphase behind me, we were right into the next block of flights...advanced acro. I know I've said yanking in the pattern is fun, but the acro is ever more so. The Monday after FL I flew twice, with the second flight being my first area solo. The first flight was a demo-do kind of flight. The IP would show me what the maneuver should look like, and then I'd give it a shot. Besides the loop, aileron roll and split-s from before, we were now doing the cuban 8, lazy 8, immelman, chandelle, cloverleaf and barrel roll. I'm sure you can read about those maneuvers somewhere else on the web, so I'm not going to try and explain them. They're fun, that's all there is to it!

Now, back to my area solo. Like most of this stuff, I can't even explain how cool it was to be taking an Air Force jet out by myself to flip and spin around alone! How awesome is that?! Not to mention this is my job!! In this block of flights, I've been able to go to the MOA 4 times solo to practice the acro in preparation for my Final Contact checkride the beginning of next week. I'm totally ready for it, and just need to keep doing what I've been doing. The only thing that's easy to do with this new stuff is to go out the top or bottom of the assigned area. If you get set up and then start stringing the maneuvers together without keeping a good eye on your altitude, you'll find yourself a little too high or a little too low. Anyway, I'm not too worried about doing that...I'll be shooting for a 0 to 3 downgrade excellent. (0E-3E).

Once Monday is over with, I'll be into formation flying...that's going to ROCK! My formation and instruments checkride will be the only two I have left before we track select into T-1's, T-38's, T-44's or a helicopter trainer that I can't remember the name of. You all know by now T-38's is my goal, and I'll be finding out 30 June at our track select party if I reached that goal. There's only one more test as well before we're academics complete, and I'm definitely looking forward to that! We had our first Navigation test yesterday, and again thank God...another 100%. I did miss a question, but it's being thrown out.

Well, that's all for now. I need to hit the gym and then meet up with some friends to study for the checkride Monday.