Week 32 & 33

Week 32

I passed my checkride and did really well. I still think I could have done better, but I will take the score. Of course with my luck I got the crappy check ride pilot and honestly with how I did I think I should have gotten a much better score. It’s hard because everything is such a competition now where everyone is fighting for the plane and location of their choice. On Friday I went on my first out and back. This is where we fly to a location, do a bunch of instrument approaches, land and eat lunch, and then fly back to Laughlin. These are cool because I get the opportunity to eat lunch at a bunch of really cool places.

Week 33

Pretty much more of the same this week. Flying was pretty much standard except for Wednesday. A huge system of thunderstorms developed in Texas and of course the Air Force’s fly no matter what mentality meant that we were pretty much going to ignore the fact that they were headed towards Laughlin. We changed our plan 3 different times finally deciding on El Paso as our outbase. Also because of the weather we switched to only flying me that day, so I logged 3.2 hours by myself (which is a lot). When we stepped to the jet we were told that we had about 15 minutes until they went stop launch and were not going to let any airplanes leave. So, we did about the fastest ground ops in history and taxied in only 10 minutes. When we were holding short ready for takeoff they asked us to be a weather ship (basically fly into the storm and find out how bad and which direction it is moving). You know me, I was all for it. It was way cool seeing the thunderclouds from that close. They were so tall and dark. It rained like crazy and my partner got all kinds of pics. It was a good flight and the weather in El Paso was good. When we decided to go home we realized that the line of thunderstorms had blocked almost any route we could use to get home. We were actually on our way to diverting to Midland, Tx when air traffic control said there was a break near the border. So, we flew pretty much a mile from the border back to Laughlin. It was really neat seeing the fence along the border and the hundreds of Mexicans that were jumping, swimming, digging and running across to the other side (ha ha). On Friday we flew over Waco and say the remains of the infamous compound. Next week we have a VFR sortie which we planned to be more of a sight seeing tour. So, that should be fun.