Week Seventeen: On to Formation!

Well! This week has been pretty interesting and atypical, for a lot of reasons.

The first is that I did not fly once this week. Yup, you heard me. No flights. I did have a couple sims, but the ones following them were quickly dropped from my schedule. It turns out that sequestration is hitting us in a big way, and I don't just say that because the Commissary is closed on Monday and Tuesday and I can't go get my favorite sandwich from there on those days (though that IS pretty annoying).

Nope, because the military is forced to deal with extreme budget cuts, we've had to furlough our civilians. So one day a week, every civilian on base doesn't get to go to work which means they don't get to be paid for that day. This includes the sim instructors, so we are now in the midst of a "sim stop" due to the decreased number of sims that can be done.

So instead of having us wait around forever trying to get opted for our instrument flights, our IPs have decided to do something different: some of us have been moved on to the Formation block!

Six people (me included) from D Flight are going to be flying Form next, while the other six will continue on in Instruments. One of our guys is still in Contact, but he just got out of the Commander's Review Process. Oh! I don't think I posted this yet, but we had a successful return to Pilot Training in D Flight! One of our own had struggled and "flunked out" but the Squadron, Group, and Wing Commanders decided to keep him. So he's back flying now, in the advanced aero phase of Contact. Which is awesome for him, I'm really glad he's staying.

So for the past week I've started studying Formation stuff. There aren't too many numbers and that kind of thing. It will mostly be "hands." Meaning seat-of-the-pants, ability to fly the plane 10 feet from the wingtip of another plane.

I'm stoked.

We've had to kind of rush through the Form academics, because without them, a test (of course), and one sim ride, we won't be opted to fly. Get this: on Tuesday I will have my Form test, one last Form CAI, a Form sim, and my first Form ride. Sweet. No seriously, I'm looking forward to it!

More updates to come! Stay classy.

~ Dakota

Weeks 15 & 16: Final Contact & I-Sims

Hey there,

So I definitely took a week off from the blog! It's been a bit crazy, and the weekends seem to just fly by leaving me with little time. But I have a bit now to jot down what's happened over the past two weeks.

Last week I flew a lot of contact sorties, getting better at advanced aerobatics and preparing for my check ride. The coolest part was definitely my area solo! This was my fourth solo in the T-6, so it wasn't so nerve-wracking as before. However, this time instead of just hanging out in the Vance pattern, I took the plane out to the working areas and practiced my aerobatics all alone! It was a pretty amazing time. The whole way out there I was thinking "I'm just flying away, by myself. I can do whatever I want!" However, we are always being 'watched' by the onboard computer system that monitors all the systems. You may know this as the 'black box'. So if they wanted they could download the info it records and plot out my flight on a computer.

Anyway, I got out to the MOA and started practicing my aero. It was actually a very good opportunity to practice because there's no one in the back seat judging you / talking, so it's extremely peaceful and there's not a lot of pressure. After practicing every maneuver at least twice, I felt pretty good about them. I then started to play around a bit (staying within limits of course)! I lined myself up on one extreme side of my area and pointed diagonally to the other end to give myself as much space as possible. I then pitched upward, went to MAX power and started doing as many aileron rolls as possible. I got to 6 haha. Which doesn't sound like that much, but you start to get a little disoriented constantly rolling like that! Not to mention, diving toward the earth. I then tried inverted flight, just to see what it felt like. Imagine hanging upside down while strapped into a chair. That's about it. Oh, and the dirt and stuff on the floor of the cockpit all falls upward to the canopy haha. I took the rest of the flight easy, and pretended to shoot at a small town underneath me (the trigger in this plane doesn't do anything, not like we have munitions anyway). After pulling G's in nearly every maneuver, I started feeling a little out of it, so I decided to head back to base. Everything else went well.

That was the big part of that first week. In the next, we actually got weather cancelled twice! Which is crazy because the weather has been extremely hot, but good otherwise. I did get up for my to-check and Final Contact check ride. I seriously thought I failed it, but it turned out alright and I got a Good overall.

Now, it's weird to think, but I'm done with that phase of training! We've moved on to instruments now and it's very different. I've been simming only, because you have to have a certain number of sims done before you can actually fly an instrument ride. As a flight we killed final contact, with a 92% pass rate! Much better than our 62% pass rate on the midphase check haha.

We also had our solo party, which was pretty fun. A couple guys in our class have a pool at their house so we went there, had plenty of food and drinks, and games and such. The key part of it is the cutting of the ties, where the IP that soloed us out gives a little speech about our solo (remember my flap overspeed?) and cuts off a portion of the tie we're wearing. The more they take, the worse you did. After making fun of my flap overspeed, he took about half of it. Then you take a shot of Jeremiah Weed, which is a nasty whiskey (and the drink of fighter pilots). My guy was Mormon however, so he drank jalapeño juice haha.

That's about it for these past two weeks. Oh I also moved off base into an apartment! So that was kinda sucky, but now that I'm in it, it's so much better than my dorm.

Anyway, take care and I hope all is well. To my faithful readers, thanks!

~ Dakota

Week Fourteen: Short Week, Check Ride, 4th

So I definitely am getting later and later on these posts... And they're becoming shorter and shorter.

This week was interesting. First it was extremely short, only a three-day week, for Fourth of July. I had my first check ride on Monday, which I flew pretty well on and the ground evaluation went well. I ended up hooking because of one minor error in judgment (I won't call it a mistake because I meant to do it) and ended up on what's called an 88 ride. I passed that just fine, and then started advanced aerobatics on Wednesday.

The weekend has been incredible. It was a really good chance to relax, hang with friends, and not worry about flying. Four days off were just what I needed.

Now it's back to the grind, but I'm looking forward to my area solo (where we take the plane all ourselves out to the areas and do aerobatics and such!) and my move. I decided to move off base into a small apartment, though it's still bigger than my dorm. Plus it is an a good location, still close to the base, and will have air conditioning. Seriously that's probably one of the biggest reasons I'm moving, my dorm feels like a freaking sauna, and even better it's back to be 100+ degrees outside...

That's about it. Shortest week and post to date :)

~ Dakota

Week Thirteen: Double-turning

Why hello there,

If you're still reading, I commend you. It's funny, I can see the number of page views each post gets and they are gradually tapering off with each new update. Not that I expect people to read religiously, this is more for posterity than anything. But I do get a chuckle when the first post has like 20 views and the last one has 2, haha.

Oh well. Anyway this week was a very busy one. Four out of the five days I double-turned, which is two flying events a day. This means either a sim or an actual sortie, since both take the same amount of time, generally, and they're both graded events. On two of these double-turn days I flew twice, which was pretty sweet. I could mold the second sortie around what happened on the first, which was very beneficial to my flying.

I also carried the bone around everywhere this week, resulting in some odd looks and questions. Then I'd have to explain what happened, or simply say "It's a D Flight thing." When asked by the noob students in academics what it was, I said "It's a flight line thing, you wouldn't understand." Speaking of which, we finally got our red solo patches in the mail, which is sweet since now we don't have to wear our black name tags anymore. It's basically a sign that you're brand new when you wear the black patch, so we've moved beyond the rank of chump to semi-knowing what we're doing.

I did well on all my rides this week, and will be going to my check ride on Monday. This is the first big evaluation ride I'll experience, so it's a little nerve-wracking, but I feel good about it. There's a lot of general knowledge questions asked, as well as the actual flying skills and such. So far our flight has done pretty well on this check ride, so here's to keeping up the streak.

We are also preparing to take our Instruments 2 exam tomorrow morning, which does kind of suck seeing as how I have the check ride to study for, but overall I'm not particularly worried about it. We've had about four review sessions for this exam, and there's really a finite amount to know about this portion of academics, as with any portion.

It's been an interesting weekend... to say the least. I've enjoyed it for the most part, though today was very rough. Ended up making the best it, but my day definitely could've been better. A little sad that Spain really underperformed in their game today against Brazil... but you can't win all of them all the time. Here's hoping that this relatively bad day is a sign that tomorrow will be good.

Tune in next week for how I did!

Take care.

~ Dakota

Week Twelve: Soloed! ...with mishap (heh heh)

So this week was a pretty good one, I'd say. Overall that is, there were definitely some downsides to it, but the big picture was positive. Also this is a very picture-intensive post!

As you can guess from the title I soloed the T-6 this week! It was a pretty awesome experience, when you think about the magnitude of it. Basically I was given permission to take a $4.6 million dollar aircraft up in the air and fly around alone! Pretty amazing. It was so much quieter without an IP in the back seat, but along with that comes the knowledge that your survival depends upon YOUR actions and decisions. Pretty sobering, but overall pretty sweet.

IP's out!

Not a bad day job

Prop's spinning, chocks out

Now there was a mishap as well... and it was my fault. I'm sad to say that my solo didn't go as well as I would have liked. I was approaching the end of my sortie and had just taken off from my last touch and go before I would full stop. Up until this point I had not been getting "closed" which is essentially a short cut in the traffic pattern to turn right around after taking off, flying the length of the runway, and landing in a short amount of time. This is the ideal. Otherwise, we have to fly a large outside pattern which takes up a considerably longer amount of time. So I kept requesting closed but I never got it. So I was getting a little peeved. I had gone around the box about 6 or 7 times by the time I got fed up and decided to just land and call it a day. Well on my last takeoff, I was a little more worried about getting my closed request approved than I should have been, and it led to me forgetting to raise the flaps on my wings. I raised the gear, no problem there, but for some terrible reason I guess I thought I got the flaps when I hadn't.

So I was flying along at normal traffic pattern speed (200 knots) thinking everything's good, when I notice a weird feeling in the atmosphere of the plane. It was a slight rumbling, both a noise and a motion, and I quickly looked down to see what was wrong. That was when I saw that my flaps were still in the takeoff position. A few choice words were shouted... and I quickly put them into the up position. By that time it was too late: I had oversped my flaps by a whopping 50 knots... So I did the right thing and requested the high pattern and a chase ship to check out my aircraft to ensure there was no damage.

Once you request the high pattern, pretty much everyone in the area knows you did something wrong, so I felt pretty crappy throughout the rest of the flight. But, as the aircraft commander, I had to see it out to landing. It's not like someone's just going to magically transport into the back seat and solve all my problems. So I went through chase aircraft procedures in my In-Flight Guide, and soon enough another aircraft was joining up on me to check my wings out. It was actually pretty cool to see them that close! They were about 30 feet off my wingtip, and soon enough when we start formation training, our wingmen will be even closer. Very cool to see.

Anyway he told me my plane looked alright, so from that point on I flew at about 130 knots with my gear and flaps down and landed via a straight-in approach. Everything went fine.

On the ground, my buddies all were waiting for me. As I strode back in to them laughing at me and taking pictures, I couldn't help but crack up as well. I had screwed up pretty big time... but the important thing was that the plane was landed and I was on the ground safely. That's an important thing to remember; if nothing else went right, I'm alive.

So they escorted me to the solo tank, and proceeded to dunk me, all the while spouting off things like, "Whoa there! Going a little fast!" and "What are your flaps set to?" and stuff like that. Yeah, I've earned some ridicule.

Everything removed for the solo tank. Like the socks?

On Friday I was nominated for the bone. After some pretty embarrassing remarks from my buddies, I was voted to it unanimously. So I've been carrying around this giant freaking dog bone which you can see in the above pictures.

This weekend my mom flew a trip to Tulsa, so I drove over to see her! It was the first time I'd seen family since February, so it was pretty awesome. We hung out for the day, but she had to leave early the next day, so I headed back to Enid and had a good time the remainder of my weekend.

~ Dakota

Week Eleven: Solos, Instruments, Patches

Hey there,

So this is a day late, I know. I didn't feel like getting around to writing last night due to studying, but better late than never!

This week was a pretty good one. All told, I had six sorties, consisting of four flights and two sims. I've gotten much closer to soloing now and am only one ride away! This week my focus during flight was on the traffic pattern, since that is what the initial solo is all about. Overall my flights went pretty well, and I was able to work out some issues with certain areas of my flying. Our average work day is getting much shorter now, as well as less packed with stuff to do, though there is still a lot and some days are fuller than others. Take Friday for example. I had to show late because of a sim that would last until around 8pm, and right away I took an EPQ (a weekly quiz we have to take). Then I unexpectedly was put on the flying schedule! So I went up for a sortie and it was a really good one. After landing, we went as a class over to the academic building and had our first real academic course in about a month. This time it was covering the basics of instrument flight, which is our next phase of training after Contact. Then right after that was my sim. So it was a true 12-hour day, but I still had the energy to go out that night haha.

We also had a lot more people solo from our class. The first ones were last week, which is an incredible turnaround. They were all from C Flight, so they've really been pushing them through the program. D Flight had its first solo this week, and go figure it was one of the guys who kept getting sick in his first few rides! So that's good for him. He doesn't like being the farthest ahead of us though haha.

Sadly, this week was also a pretty bad one for another member of our flight. I won't say his name, but he hooked three rides in a row, which puts you into an 88 ride. This is a progress check ride, essentially seeing if he's good to resume normal training. However, he also hooked that one, and was moved to an 89 ride, which is an elimination check. We were all hoping that he'd do alright on it, and actually I was flying when he was and he sounded ok on the radios. But he hooked that one as well. So he's now on the Commander's Review Process, which determines his fate in the Air Force. Talking with him, it sounds like he's accepted pilot training is not for him, and that he's going to try to head into Special Operations selection training. I say good on him for wanting to do that. He's a great guy, and I really do wish the best for him. It just sucks to see how quickly you can wash out, if you're consistently having bad flying days...

But overall, we're doing alright. I might as well cover today as well. We had our Instrument 1 exam and I passed, missing four questions. This was the most I've missed on one test, so I wasn't happy about that, but a pass is a pass I guess.

Oh! Something else that's cool: our patch was officially approved and I also got the finalized design back from the patch company I've been working with! So now we just have to wait for them to get here and then get the privilege from our flight commander to wear them and we've got our class patch!

Ain't Nobody Got Time Fo Dat

So that will be on our shoulders for the next year. I think it turned out pretty well (and I'm not just saying that because I designed it... haha). On Fridays however, D Flight concurred that we would have a Friday flight patch just for us. So this is what we came up with:

The reference is to a movie called The Other Guys, and I recommend watching it, because it's hilarious. So yeah that will be our little motivational patch for the day before the weekend.

That's about all I can think of right now. I'll probably remember something else that happened, as is usually the case haha.

Hope you are doing well and everything's good for you.

~ Dakota

Week Ten: Late Shows, Long Week

Hey again,

It's late Sunday night, so I'm going to make this a pretty quick post. This week was quite a long one... seemed to drag on forever. The nice thing was our show times every day this week were between 10 and noon, which was pretty sweet.

Overall the day-to-day wasn't so bad. This was our last week in the 15 Day Program, so that was a cool thing to look forward to. I flew three times this week, and they were pretty good flights. I finished out the first block of training on Wednesday, which means I get to do new things while flying. Namely, spins. These were pretty cool: you basically bring the aircraft to a stall by climbing with power set to idle, and then right at the stall point, you add full rudder deflection in one direction, which sets the airplane into a violent spin towards the Earth. Pretty fun, like a roller coaster only there's no track. Easy to recover from too, so no worries about crashing and dying (unless you perform the recovery wrong). But mostly, the flights this week focused on traffic pattern operations and low-threat area maneuvers, the same as we've been doing in the weeks prior.

On Friday we had our first day outside the 15 Day Program. It was really cool, since our morning formal brief was vastly shorter than normal, owing to the fact that we didn't have to do a standup, shotgun questions, or say the notes-warnings-cautions! So that's something nice. We also got to have our first beers in the flight room. On Friday our flight commander went over to the "beer light" and flipped it on. We then sat around and discussed our week and also voted on who would have to carry "The Bone" for the next week. Basically whoever did the most stupid thing has to carry around this massive dog bone everywhere, even out to restaurants and bars and the like. Our reservist (the only non-Academy guy in our flight) was the unlucky guy. His was more of a cumulative two-months' worth of stuff though.

D Flight of class 14-08. The beer light is illuminated behind us to the left, our flight's patch is on the wall on the right. Pretty good group of guys!

We hit some CAIs again after quite a while away from that dreaded lab of boredom. They weren't too bad though.

I dunno, mostly it was a pretty standard week, but it just took forever to go by. I try and pass the long hours of the day by at least hitting the gym. Gives you a chance to not think and just work out. Vital, I think, in order to not lose sanity.

The weekend was nice, just a lot of hanging out with friends in the gorgeous weather. Honestly, life is good, and I find myself looking forward to going in to work, which is all I can ask for. But the time off is great too haha.

It's been getting pretty hot here. In fact this week, we're supposed to have temperatures in the 100s... Yay for heat waves.

Take it easy!

~ Dakota