Weeks 35 & 36: Bad Weather and Solo

It's been a bit since I wrote a post, so I'll get to it now. The past two weeks have been interesting, if a bit boring. The highlight was definitely being able to solo the T-38, though the experience was somewhat dampened by bad weather and shortened flight times.

I'll start with two weeks ago. Really things have been going pretty smoothly, I flew pretty regularly and they went well. I was just trying to get opted for my initial solo, but with the weather being crappy the conditions weren't right for transition rides. We ended up doing quite a few instrument rides, trying to get T-rides when we could. On Friday I ended up flying a pretty good sortie to get opted to solo. It was actually a bit eerie; the clouds formed a perfect deck at about 7,000 feet, so from the MOA you were looking down at a floor of white clouds. I don't know what it is about the 38, but when you're nose-down on the last part of a loop or something like that, the ground appears pretty dang close to you. Probably because you're going so fast towards it, but even so, you're at least 10,000 feet away from it assuming you stay in the MOA. So yeah, staring down at the clouds while finishing those over-the-top maneuvers was odd. But pretty sweet as well.

Anyway, the weekend went by and I was ready to go for my solo on Monday. Driving into work, the sky appeared like it would be clear, at least to the west, so I was feeling good about my chances to go up. For whatever reason (Oklahoma's weather sucks) a ceiling of clouds rolled in and the weather turned miserable. They still were going to open the pattern, so I would be flying a pattern-only sortie. While slightly bummed, I prepped up, got all bundled up for the impending cold and stepped out to the jet. It's true what they say: when you're going solo, every strange noise or feel of the plane pops out at you, and you get freaked out by things you probably wouldn't notice while dual. The cold while doing ground ops was terrible; another incentive to get them done quickly. As I drove out of the chocks to head over to the runway, I felt bad for the crew chiefs.

Everything went fine on the taxi out, no runway incursions or anything like that. I had to leave my engines running slightly high to get my oil pressure within limits, but everything else went pretty normally. Due to the cold, we've had a lot of compressor stalls recently. This basically means that the normal smooth airflow through an engine gets interrupted for whatever reason. Anyway, you lose half your available thrust if one of these happens, so to preclude them, you have to run-up to MIL power while jamming on the brakes to let the engines stabilize, then bump the throttles up into minimum afterburner (AB). Once you get the indications that your burners lit, you can then smoothly apply max AB and release the brakes.

Another bad thing the cold gets you is a real potential to overspeed the gear or flaps. The plane performs a lot better in the cold, but better performance leads to a faster speed-up, so you've got to be quick with the gear. Everything went fine on my takeoffs and landings though, unlike my T-6 initial solo.

As a solo student, you're not allowed to land with more than 2,500 pounds of fuel onboard. So we immediately go up to the high pattern, which mimics the normal pattern ground track except that it's 1,200 feet higher. So you're not a conflict for anyone while you drive NASCAR-style around the pattern. I did five laps before I could call my gas and descend to do normal patterns and landings.

All the while, more and more weather was rolling in, so by the time I was actually doing landings and such, the visibility was pretty bad. The T-38 ops supervisor ended up calling the runway supervisory unit and me, talking about the weather and me doing a full-stop. They let me have another touch-and-go, and then I full-stopped. Everything went well though, I was just bummed I could only fly a 0.7-hour flight.

The rest of the week I barely flew, despite the weather being clear and a million. Hopefully in this upcoming week I can get some more flights and possibly two more solos before we leave for winter break. We have our transition check rides coming up soon, so we are going to be left with a good amount of flights after break to relocate our good flying form after spending a week and half at home.

That's about it! Pretty uneventful two weeks, though the solo was a big accomplishment. It was really cool to look around at what I was doing and realize that even though I was only flying around the pattern, I was doing so in a fighter-type aircraft and not messing anything up. Pretty cool.

Hope your weeks were good ones, thanks for reading!

~ Dakota

Week Thirty-Four: Thanksgiving Break

Well, I can't truly call this much of a UPT week, since we got two days off and I spent the last four days back home in Colorado, but I'll go ahead with a quick post anyway.

Three days were all we had as far as flying goes this week, and they were all pretty good. The weather was great and we got a lot of flights done as a class. Our baby class, 14-09, also started flying Wednesday, so now we'll probably see a decrease in the number of lines we'll fly as our two classes start eating up the ones we have available.

But regardless, we are getting close to soloing the T-38, which will be a pretty awesome experience. The syllabus calls for only 11 flights before the initial solo, which is really crazy when you think about it. But I feel ready, so hopefully sometime next week I'll head out to the MOAs alone with this sweet jet.

After double-turning on Wednesday, I drove down to Oklahoma City for my flight out to Denver, and from then on spent a relaxing time at home eating turkey, seeing old friends and family, and just generally enjoying Colorado's great weather and some cool places I haven't seen in a while.

Back now in good old Enid. The booming metropolis of northern Oklahoma.

Woopie.

Focusing on getting to solo now, and having a good couple of weeks before I get on another plane to Colorado for Christmas break.

Hope your Thanksgiving was a good one!

~ Dakota

Weeks 32 & 33: Dollar Ride and Trans

Hey there,

Sorry, I was a bit lazy last weekend despite it being a three-day, so I'll just cover the past two weeks in one post.

Well, I finally flew the T-38. It was definitely something new, the amount of power you feel on initial takeoff is something else. It makes the T-6 look like a joke. Kicking into afterburner while stationary on the ground just gets you moving so quickly, before you know it you're screaming along, ready to rotate at 145 knots. Climbing away, you get the gear up and it goes even quicker, and you've got to bring the nose 15º high just to maintain 300 knots. It's pretty incredible.

Before all that though, you do the standard scheme of a flight in UPT: prepare and plan for the sortie, brief it up, grab your gear and step to life support, then run through ground ops. The brief is much the same, though we do a lot more prep and they expect a professional and quiet student. You speak when spoken to, and only ask a question if they ask if you have any. Below is a picture of our briefing board, which we prep for each flight.

It outlines the mission data, objectives, and the EP of the day. You also prep the normal stuff, to include weather, bird status, and NOTAMs (which are temporary changes to airfields).

This time, the big change is now that we strap on our parachute instead of the light harness the T-6 used. So you've got a big turtle-shell on you along with everything else. We have to ride a bus down to the 38s, and finally stepping out toward your jet is a pretty good feeling. I still was in a surreal state of mind when I climbed up the ladder to my cockpit and started running through ground ops. Starting up the engines in this plane is a much more involved process, especially for the crew chief. They have to connect compressed air that starts the engine blades rotating, and from there we hit the start button and advance the individual throttle. They also help with the flight control surface checks, since it's difficult to see them; you're pretty far forward and they're all a ways behind the cockpits.

Taxiing out is pretty cool too. The weather's been fairly nice, though a bit cold, but we almost always taxi with the canopies open, a definite change from the T-6. With the engines sitting behind the cockpit, you're not worried about them hurting you, so you can taxi convertible-style all the way until you're ready for takeoff. We also taxi much further, out to the outside runways which are much longer than the T-6 runway.

The takeoff is awesome, like a described. You just rocket down the runway, accelerating like crazy. However, there is a worry about engine failure and your ability to either stop in the remaining distance or continue the takeoff. Since we have to go so fast to takeoff, the stopping distance is pretty large. Likewise, with an engine failure, your output is greatly reduced, so you've got to accelerate much more in order to lift off. Basically it boils down to a go/no-go speed which we would abort prior to and takeoff after.

The rest of the flight goes extremely fast, since you're burning through gas so quickly. In the T-6, you could spend 30 minutes in the area doing maneuvers and then head to our practice landing airfield for some landings before heading home. Now we just hit up the area for 20 minutes or so, then drive straight back to Vance for a couple patterns and landings and then full stopping.

I've flown five sorties over the past two weeks and all of them have last one hour on the dot. So the average sortie duration is much shorter. You just have to be that much better, since you don't have the luxury of repeating maneuvers.

It's pretty awesome though. I'm definitely enjoying it, in spite of the long hours and studying. It's pretty amazing to be flying a jet like this, something I'd not get to do in any other aviation program.

Looking forward to the next couple months!

~ Dakota

Week Thirty-One: Weather Week

As you can probably guess, this last week was heavily influenced by the weather, mostly in a negative way.

We ended up having a stretch of stormy and overcast weather hit northern Oklahoma for most of the week, which really messed up any plans for dollar rides this week. Monday was the soonest that any of us were ready to fly, but each flight got cancelled due to low ceilings which made it impossible to open up the traffic pattern. And the whole point of these first few rides is not to fly instruments but to get us used to the ground references and visual flight.

So Monday went down the drain, followed by Tuesday and Wednesday with the same, if not worse, conditions. Rainy, sleety, cloudy conditions prevailed throughout most of the week. Thursday was pretty interesting though; it was by far the worst weather of the week in the morning, but by afternoon it was sunny and clear. We actually had rides get cancelled in the morning go, and then those who got nixed got to see the later lines go out to fly. So 14-08 had its first flights in the T-38 this week, which is pretty sweet.

I had been a bit behind due to the way scheduling has gone, so the weather didn't affect me too much. I simmed quite a bit this week, finally finishing up those that would opt me to fly. When Friday's schedule showed up, I was on it. 1206 would be my takeoff time, and the forecast showed clear skies and great weather, if a bit windy.

Here's where the weather screwed us again. Because it was so nice on Friday, the schedulers decided to scratch our dollar ride lines and send up formation solos that needed to fly before they would have to fly a dual sortie again due to time constraints. The syllabus is a complicated system to explain briefly, but basically they needed to send up the solo students in order to prevent having to give extra dual flights. With the way budget issues are right now, it makes sense. So us new kids got to wait around, though we helped out with the Halloween treat-or-treat going on in the squadron. Families of the pilots working at Vance got to go through and get candy from us, and there were Halloween decorations and whatnot.

So Monday should be the big day, I will be sure to talk about what it's like to fly the 38 so stay tuned and have a good week. Looking forward to flying again!

~ Dakota

Weeks 29 & 30: The Fuge

I wanted to delay posting last week since we had a pretty short week, coupled with the fact that last Sunday my classmates and I were traveling down to San Antonio for centrifuge training, so we stayed pretty busy.

After a short, four-day week due to Columbus Day, there wasn't much to tell. We've just been going through Applied Aerodynamics academics, which have been pretty low-threat. I had one sim that week as well, which was good. It was the first one I got to actually do stuff while flying, instead of simply running through checklists and switches.

The weekend rolled around and we had already prepped the travel plans for our trip down to Texas. Sunday morning we all met up on base and hopped in a shuttle to drive down to Oklahoma City for the flight to San Antonio. It was actually a cool day. We hung out at the airport, grabbed some breakfast, and then had a short layover in Houston. After hopping over to San Antonio, we split ways temporarily and headed to two different car rental places. My two passengers and I got a sweet VW Golf. Probably the coolest car ever. No seriously.

We drove over to our luxurious hotel (La Quinta) and dropped off our bags. Then it was a night out on the river walk, though we had to not drink anything to keep ourselves from getting dehydrated the next day. So it was waters and Arnold Palmers that night. We did have some good food throughout the day and got to check out the Alamo.

Then, the fuge. On Monday we drove down to Brooks AFB and went to the sketchy-looking buildings that housed the centrifuge. After getting refreshed on our AGSM techniques and learning about some of the do's and don't's of the fuge, we got all set up in a break room with windows showing the spinning contraption.

Our SRO went first, followed by alphabetic order. I was third to last, so I got to see a good amount go before me. It looked... painful. And it was. Basically we started out with a gradual increase in g-loading until we lost our peripheral vision. This gives you your resting g tolerance. I had a 4.4 resting tolerance, not the greatest but pretty average. The highest of our group was 6.3.

Then we started with the profiles. First there's 4 g's for 15 seconds. Not too bad, and I didn't lose any vision. Next up was 5 g's for 30 seconds. Once again, 5 g's isn't too bad momentarily, but for 30 seconds you really start to get tired, straining your lower body and only breathing every 3 seconds. Still I did fine and had no vision loss. Next up was the big one, 7.5 for 15 seconds. I definitely did lose some light; I started to bear down my upper body instead of focusing on straining my legs. So some definite room for improvement, but I ended up alright.

Lastly there's a profile called SACM, where you are pretending to chase an enemy aircraft and you're pulling g's to do so. So it's 7 g's for 10 seconds, 6 for 5, 5 for 5, and then 7 for 10.  Overall this was tiring, but you do get quick rests in between each pull. I finished the fuge profiles and they stopped spinning me. The hatch opened on my right and I struggled out. It felt like I had just run 10 miles and I was wobbling as I walked back to the break room. My flight suit was covered in sweat and I felt awful. It really sucked. So I sipped on some gatorade and watched the last two people go. We got debriefed on our performance (they take videos of the whole thing happening) and got our disc with the videos on it. We also got little morale patches (which we can't wear anymore...) that said GLOC with the word crossed out. G-induced loss of consciousness is what it stands for, and no one passed out so that was good.

Monday night we went hard. I'll leave it at that (heh heh).

Tuesday we recovered with some breakfast at Denny's and headed back to the airport to return to good old Enid. This week was pretty boring, I didn't sim at all, so I'm not opted to fly yet. But the first dollar rides of class 14-08 will be tomorrow, so that's pretty awesome. Can't wait to fly.

Tune in next week, I'll have my first flight in the T-38 to describe!

~ Dakota

Week Twenty-Eight: Systems and Sims

Hello again,

Well, things have been going pretty well, really we've just been keeping busy with lots of studying, systems classes, and a couple sims.

I forgot to mention last week that we took a quick visit back to Aerospace Physiology, where we went through egress training once again. The 38 is different from the T-6 in its seat, so we had to learn the new connections, methods, and all that kind of stuff. One big difference is that now we will be wearing our own parachutes, which connect to the seat and also double as a back cushion of sorts. The seat (like the jet) is about 50-60 years old, and its capabilities are not near as good as the Martin-Baker seat in the T-6. The ejection envelope is a bit smaller, which means that below certain airspeeds the seat won't save you. We'll be the last flight with this seat; they're upgrading the 38s with brand new Martin-Baker seats, but only after we and also 14-09 have started Phase III.

Sims have been pretty low-threat, really it's just switching switches and doing checklists so far. But soon enough we'll be moving into the Transition block of training. Transition is essentially Contact, and is so named because we are moving into a new aircraft. The numbers and some policies are different, but much of what we did in the prior phase will help with 38s. They're just so much faster and there's a lot more at risk.

There are only five tests in 38s, which is kind of nice. But there is a lot more on each test. Like the systems test: after a two weeks of academics we had our test, so all of that material was testable. I only missed one, so that was good.

I'm running out of things to say quick here, really there won't be much to say until we start flying. We go to the centrifuge this Sunday, so that's a quick hop on commercial air down to San Antonio. Monday will be the big day, we have a 7.5 g profile to get through, so I've been getting up for that.

I promise the posts will quickly get more exciting, it's just now we don't do too much in T-38-landia besides study, CAIs, and sims. So it's not the most exhilarating of stuff right now. But soon.

Hope all is well and if you're still reading this far, I commend you. Take it easy!

~ Dakota

Week Twenty-Seven: 12-Hour Days...

Well, it's been a long week! I am just updating quickly tonight, since it's late and I need to catch some sleep.

The first week in T-38s went pretty well, though it has been a little rough based solely on the amount of time we spend at work each day. We are on formal release, which if you remember from T-6s means that we can't leave until they let us go. And in 38s they are much more strict on all fronts, so we're pretty much stuck at work for our entire 12-hour duty day. Last week was an early show week, so it was 0630 to 1830 (or thereabouts) every day.

What do we do the whole time? Well we are doing academics (CAIs again! Hooray) but those only go for so long. The rest of the time we're in our flight room studying the myriad topics that have to do with the 38. We are also pretty heavy into Systems now, and just like before, they go very in-depth.

Overall, I'm enjoying it though. The other guys (and gal) who went 38s are pretty cool, and we get along well. It is also sweet to be learning this aircraft, and knowing that in just a couple of weeks we'll be heading out to the flight line to fly.

It's kind of odd to feel like we don't know anything again. At least at the end of T-6s we were pretty comfortable with the way things went. Mostly this is evident in our lack of knowledge on how ground ops will work, as well as the in-flight checks we'll be doing. This is because we haven't actually sat in a cockpit yet, but we are now opted for the very first "switchology" sims so we'll get more acquainted with the dials and buttons here shortly. The verbiage is also very different, and of course we'll have to say and do everything according to the 25th FTS's way of operating.

That's it, like I said, this is a short post! Take it easy.

~ Dakota