Week 29, 30 & 31

Week 29

The only thing that is good about flying 6 hour missions is that the 12 hour days go by quick. The weeks just seem to be flying by, which is perfectly fine to me. Flying was pretty much standard this week. I did fly out to Roswell New Mexico again which was pretty cool. At first I thought I saw an alien spacecraft, but it turned out to be a couple of F-117’s that were in the pattern with us. It was neat seeing them, but the pilots said that those planes are pretty boring to fly because the computer pretty much does everything. I had another emergency procedures SIM this week as well. I actually enjoy those, they make you think about ways to solve problems you can encounter in the airplane and if you come up with the wrong solution it is pretty evident when you become a large, black, smoking hole in the ground. My flying partner and I were doing so well that the instructor decided to make things interesting for us. So, he gave us a #1 engine oil system malfunction which caused us to shut down the engine, followed shortly by an engine fire in the #2 engine. We were only going on the #2 engine so we had to let that one burn until we could restart the #1 engine and hope that it could get us back to Laughlin. When we got to final and were about to lower the landing gear, the IP gave us a hydraulic system failure which takes out our landing gear, brakes, flaps and nose wheel steering. So, we were about to land with only a half working engine, hydraulic failure and then to top it off he failed our only working generator so we lost all electrics. We surprised him that when were about to land it safely, so he put in a wind shear that forced us to crash. He told us that he would have done anything to get us to crash and we had gotten farther than any other crew he’d seen.

Week 30

Flying is going good. I am getting more confident with the aircraft each flight. Nothing super exciting happened flying wise, so there is not much to report. I am already looking forward to being done with pilot training and start being treated like an adult again, where I don’t have to fill out a form 29B (permission slip) to go out of town.

Week 31

Another pretty average week. There is not really a whole lot that happened. I am now academic complete for pilot training. That means no more classes and no more tests (except the weekly EPQ’s). We are all pretty excited to be finished with that. Friday I flew my “to check” which is the flight right before your checkride to make sure that you are ready. I passed, so I have my first checkride in T-1’s on Monday. It is not really to much different then the T-6 checkride’s, however it is a whole lot more general knowledge intensive. I think I am ready, I just need to practice drawing out the various systems in the T-1. We did fly over a front the other day which was pretty cool. It was the first time I have seen anything like that. The clouds were pretty thick and looked like a white blanket until we got to the front. The clouds then rose about 20,000’ and just dropped off like a cliff. After the front it was perfectly clear without any clouds at all. It was like the front was just dragging the clouds along with it.