Monday, March 24, 2014

Weeks 49 & 50: On the Brink, Back Again

It's getting really close now! I counted it out and after this post I'll only have two left to do until the week of assignment night. Very crazy…

Anyway a lot of stuff has happened over these past two weeks, so I'll get right into it:

We've hit a string of extremely good weather recently, so it's been pretty non-stop as far as flying goes. Needless to say we've been busy, but the end is nigh and the stuff we're doing is awesome, so it makes the day go by a bit better. I flew eight events in five days in week forty-nine, so a TON of flying which helped to catch me back up to be on track. Overall things went pretty well, and I got one more solo in before the end of the week.

Unfortunately, on Friday I hooked a ride. It was a daily ride, so nothing that would be unrecoverable, but it still left me with a crappy end to the week. But that's not all! Even better, we were scheduled to fly on Sunday as well, and I was the lucky guy chosen to fly with the squadron commander…

It was a very bad ride. Despite trying to do my best, I messed up some pretty big things and overall the S.A. of the flight was just not there. As my wingman and I sat awaiting our debrief, we both knew we were going to get destroyed. And we did. So that was two hooks in a row. I've never had that happen before, so naturally I was pretty worried. I didn't get much sleep that night, thinking about what could happen and my future in the Air Force. Especially since on Monday I was scheduled with the group commander next.

Monday's brief came up, and I got switched last minute to another IP, and I was pretty relieved. Weirdly enough, my flight lead's gear didn't retract properly on initial takeoff, so it was an incomplete ride and I would have to wait until Tuesday to clean up my hooks. After waiting another night, I flew on Tuesday and managed to clean everything up.

The rest of the week was filled with flights, and I got a lot closer to my form check ride. With two solos still to go, four rides overall, it would be a good opportunity to practice everything and get all prepped up for the check ride.

Stressful couple of weeks, some days worse than others, but overall my eyes are on the prize and now just got to finish off strong. Hope your weeks went well!

~ Dakota

1 comment:

  1. I had confidence that you would make the perfect flight after your two 'hooks". After all this is why it is called training. Learn from your mistakes and move forward. Good job Lieutenant Newton.

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