Instrument Ground School

This past week I started IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) ground school. Basically it consists of two weeks were the Navy tries to teach us everything we need to know about flying and navigating in bad weather. Above is a picture I took of what my bedroom floor looks like while I try to study. An incredible volume of knowledge is needed to be able to take off, fly into the clouds, navigate to a destination, approach and land safely without being able to see where you are going. Not only that, but the procedures for flight have to be closely regulated and monitored because of the massive volume of traffic in US airways. Its intimidating to start ground school because you realize just how much you dont know about flying. After the solo, you THINK you know how to fly. Now you realize, all you were doing was playing around at low altitude in good weather. Real pilots fly up high in all kinds of miserable weather conditions.

Flight school seems to be an endless cycle. First you realize how little you know about controlling an aircraft. Then, spurred on by a desire to prove yourself, you put your head down and learn massive amounts of material, pass the test/checkride and move on. Your confidence balloons as you master new skills in the air - only to be deflated all over again at the start of the next phase. I'm currently being re-humbled, for what certainly is not the last time.

In Formation

This is hard ^^

No, I take that back. Its REALLY hard.

It is an entirely unnatural thing to try to make one airplane stay in one exact point in space relative to another. The airplane you are flying will buck and shake and generally do anything it can in order to get away from the other one (or at least thats what it feels like). Compounding this difficulty is the fact that when your aircraft successfully gets a little separation from the other, it isnt always obvious what to do to get it back into position. For example, you are flying wing, trying to hold position on the lead aircraft (the one on the left in the picture above) and lead is in a turn. Say you drift outside the turn and slightly away from lead, common sense tells you to angle in, to get closer. If you do that, you'll move in and also behind lead. To correct this you have to angle in and simultaneously increase power to keep from falling behind. Now you're back in position, but you're also going to fast. Once you've caught back up to lead, you have to take the power correction out to hold position. Inevitably at this point something else is wrong (you're too low, too high etc) and you have to input the correct combination of power, elevator and aileron to correct for the new error. Sound hard? It is. At to all this some choppy wind gusts, lead aircraft turning, speeding up, leveling off or lowering his landing gear and it gets more and more difficult. But when you get it, when you're mind starts comprehending the situation faster and faster, and you can correct and hold position with out consciously thinking - its a real rush...I'm not quite there yet :-)

If you have ever seen the Blue Angels fly, you know they make tight formation look easy. But they make formation look easy the way Yo-Yo Ma makes the cello look easy. Right now I'm still trying to hammer out a few notes.

Solo!

Finally after a week of rain and bad weather, I passed the checkride and took the T-34C out, sans instructor, on my first solo. The more I think about it, the more I find it slightly ridiculous that the military entrusts me with a million-dollar airplane after all of 25 hrs in the front cockpit. Fair warning to all civilian pilots: STAY AWAY from southern Alabama. The skies are filled with student aviators with entirely too little experience flying airplanes with entirely too much power.
That said, I'm glad the Navy and the taxpayers let me do it. Theres a real peace at 8000 ft with nothing but you and the steady humm of a turboprop...

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After moving from the energetic, buzzing metropolis of Austin,TX to the sleepy town of Milton,FL I find myself with long stretches of time with little to do. Ive traded the "Live Music Capitol of the World" for the "Canoe Capitol of Florida" (I didn't make that up its all over the road signs here). Ive left one of the most creative and interesting cities in the country for a small town near the Alabama/Florida border. Ive traded 6th street for Main St and live music joints for bingo parlors. How the heck did I end up here? Oh right - FLIGHT SCHOOL!


Recently Ive started Primary Flight Training here at NAS Whiting Field. Which, regrettably, is in the middle of nowhere. However, all the drawbacks of the location are outweighed by one thing - I get paid to fly.

Right now I'm in the contact phase (the very beginning) which focuses on teaching us to safely pilot the T-34C Turbomentor. It looks like an old WWII plane, and lends itself to daydreams of me being an old fighter ace. Daydreams which are inevitably shattered by the instructor in the rear cockpit pulling the throttle all the way off and saying "Simulated Engine Failure." Training right now is mostly about learning how to fly the military landing pattern and handling the aircraft in all kinds of system failures. On a typical 2 hour flight the instructor will make the engine "fail" or "catch on fire" 5 or 6 times. The instructor pilots (or IP's as we call them) love to try and fluster the students with constant simulated emergencies, all the while criticizing us from the rear cockpit as we try to simultaneously recall the emergency procedures (EPs) and keep from crashing. Its not a whole lot of fun, but after a couple more weeks of this Ill be able to solo. Which means Ill finally be able to kick the instructor out the back of MY airplane and take it where I want to.

Thats all for now, back to the books...