Precheck

I flew a solid airplane today. I was surprised, given the fact that I had less sleep than I usually do. I flew an NDB approach, a few visual patterns, and the same ILS final three times for a 3-engine landing and two 3-engine go-arounds. Besides the duplicate maneuvers for proficiency, it was basically the checkride profile I'm going to fly next Thursday.

The show time was so early this morning, that I got back from work in time to make breakfast before 9:30. I have a three day weekend and only two days of work next week. Can't complain.

Crunch Time

Today's WST seems like it was yesterday, because I had to get up at 3:30. We flew a checkride prep profile again, including landings at various flap configurations, a circling approach, an ILS, a 3-engine go-around, and 3-engine landing. I felt a little more comfortable, but my ILS was a little erratic, and my 3-engine go-around in the weather, was shaky, so that needs work as well. I have to go to bed early again today for another really early show time. Checkride next Thursday with plenty of time to study up and chairfly.



Courtesy of Airline World and balint01

Recovery

This past weekend provided some much-needed rest and a break from work.

My flying in today's WST was much better compared to last week. We flew a checkride profile with a circling approach, an ILS, and a couple of visual patterns. I still need practice on my no-flap approaches and complete all the little things copilots need to do sooner and more methodically, but I felt much improved.

Enlistment

Today after some instrument refresher academics, I was taking care of some paperwork in the Personnel office, when a TSgt came up to me. He had a young kid with him, and needed an officer to enlist him. I'd never done that before, so I thought it quite the honor. We just went into one of the offices and stood by the flag. I stood in front of the kid, and read the oath of enlistment while he raised his right hand and repeated it. The Sgt took a picture with his phone. Pretty cool.

Instrument Practice

Yesterday I just plain flew terribly. It was ugly. After some chairflying, hopefully next time will be better.

Stopovers and ERO

Yesterday's sim was at midnight, so my sleep schedule is a little wonky for the week. I have another one tonight. Yesterday's sim was 4 hours long. It was a multi-leg mission involving four different airports, which is fairly realistic as far as I've been told. Our sim didn't involve any emergencies, so that was nice. The ceiling was so low at our third stop that we had to divert to the fourth location, so we didn't land where we had planned. The lessons are scripted though, so we knew it would happen. The whole thing was really an exercise in crew coordination. We had a Nav, and when you fly with a Nav, you're expected to make full use of his/her abilities and tools, so I tend to delegate the details of navigation to them. Our Nav did most of the preflight planning as far as the route of flight was concerned. Pilots decide which approaches to fly. I flew an ARA (airborne radar approach), which is like a PAR in that the Nav is using the aircraft radar to guide the pilot to the runway. It's pretty cool stuff. At one of the intermediate stops, we ran through the Engine Running Offload checklist, which was fairly straightforward, but good, because I hadn't seen it yet.

Off to sim again. Tonight is more instrument flying and checkride practice.

EPE

Yesterday was the end of course test, and I scored a 91. Not the best, but not the worst. I was hoping for better, but no big deal. It's over. Today was the EPE, and we had a really short pre-brief. The evaluator just asked us to discuss some details about the engine and when you should shut it down. The eval itself was fairly straightforward. No curveballs. However, for the rejected takeoff where I was copilot, I told the pilot he could bring the throttles over the gate back into ground idle when he hadn't shut the engine down yet. You're supposed to feather a prop that's misbehaving on the runway. That whole sequence wasn't our finest hour. The nice thing about the Herc is having a crew to catch your mistakes, so everyone theoretically shares blame in the cockpit. Nice to have a weekend. The colors in the trees this time of year are really beautiful. It makes it fun to drive around with the top down.

EPE Prep

The last two days have just been CPT sims with a smattering of malfunctions to prepare us for our Emergency Procedures Evaluation on Friday. An Air Force pilot administers the eval, while one of the contractors works the sim. The sims and the pre-briefs really haven't been too bad, but I need to continue to study.

Tomorrow we have the end of course exam and a review of aircraft systems.

More practice

Today's sim was really pretty simple, but it was just the practice we needed. We both flew a circling approach followed by a 3-engine ILS. It was a great opportunity to practice instrument procedures and refine 3-engine ILS stick and rudder skills. We flew about ten approaches and landings at the end of the sim and finished up with a demonstration max-effort landing on the assault strip. It was pretty cool to land on a 60' wide piece of runway even in a sim. Looking forward to more of that down the road.

MLS

Wednesday was just another CPT trainer where we looked at more malfunctions, this time in the hydraulic system and went through the reject procedures again. Not too bad. We had a really good student engineer, so things were teetering on the edge of boring. Good to have sims like that sometimes.

Yesterday's WST sim was a little frustrating. I flew a terrible ILS, and then the sim broke. It just lost all power and my instructor called it quits. We were technically done, but I just felt I'd ended on a bad note.

Today made up for it, in that I flew a good MLS, which is almost indistinguishable from an ILS when you're flying it. MLS stands for microwave landing system. It's a precision approach that the military used to think was going to be the next big thing. Eventually GPS took off and MLS was left mostly obsolete. It's conceivable that the Air Force may still use them someday, so we practice shooting MLS approaches every once in awhile.

The Herc can do some pretty cool stuff. We did a windmill taxi start, where you get three engines up and taxi at high speed down the runway to get the fourth engine started. You could do that if the starter in one of your engines was broken. We also practiced a three-engine takeoff, which is another nice trick to have available.

When we were all done, we just practiced landing after landing. I probably got six or seven reps, and it was nice to get the practice and the confidence.

Electrical Malfunctions

Yesterday we had a CPT, and today we had the WST follow up for it. Both were all about electrical malfunctions. The FE (flight engineer) was busy the whole time today. We (the pilots) weren't exactly bored, having to declare an emergency, fly an approach, and follow up with the emergency procedures, but the FE was pulling circuit breakers, dealing with bleed air, isolating buses, and trying to diagnose prop problems all at the same time. We finally made it to the ground safely. We switched seats, and I flew the second leg. I had a prop problem and an overtorque on different engines, which led to two different engine shutdowns and therefore a two-engine situation. We were on final approach, and the sim killed both of the remaining engines as well, so we landed in the dirt. HA! The gear was already down, so I just had to kick the rudder to avoid hitting a big white building. Eventful to say the least.

Two Engines Out

Today's WST was all about C-130 performance characteristics. After several rejects for various issues, we took off VFR and leveled off at 2000' for some steep turns and approach to stalls. The IP took us through a couple of infamous scenarios which ended badly. One was a final turn stall while turning into the dead engine with power off, which is easily recoverable if identified in a timely fashion. The other, a rudder fin stall, requires more effort to correct, but is difficult to reproduce under normal circumstances (requires almost a full rudder swap). We ended with a two-engines-out situation which found me scrambling to get checklists complete, systems shutdown, landing gear down, maintain a controllable aircraft and actually land. I barely made it back to the field, and actually had to land on the taxiway/ramp. Don't get slow with only two good engines. Noted.

Flight Sim

If you are unable for whatever reason to actually go flying, but still have an interest in flying, I recently discovered a quality open source flight simulator available for all major operating systems. FlightGear provides a flight simulator experience much like Microsoft Flight Simulator at only the cost of a download. I recommend a decent video card if you don't want your system to slow to a crawl. There are numerous custom aircraft you can download as well.