NVG Sims

This phase of training has gone by at a much slower pace, so it's been good to relax a bit. I usually only have three events per week. Last week we had some mission planning academics for NVGs and I flew two NVG sim missions. Flying with NVGs, even in the sim, is pretty cool. They amplify any visible or infrared light in their field of view, allowing you to see great detail in environments with very low light. It's amazing to see, even on a screen, a runway under NVGs where there is only darkness to the naked eye. So far I've flown an airland mission (no airdrop) and an assault landings mission, where we focused on different recoveries and max-effort landings (slow speeds, steeper glidepaths). Today we had another mission planning exercise for a single-ship NVG airdrop mission simulated in a deployed location.

Pilot Pro and NVGs

Yesterday morning I had a really early pilot proficiency (pro) sim. It was really low threat. It was so low-key that the Nav didn't even have a scheduled instructor. My IP let us develop the profile, so we flew an ARA, an ILS, and some visual patterns. I finished it up with an engine out landing. An ARA is an airborne radar approach where the nav looks at the runway from the radar at gives the pilot vectors to fly until breaking out of the weather. It's valuable, because it's self-contained. I was a little rusty, but happy with my performance. It was weird doing everything in the right seat after so much left seat time in Phase 1. The IP even let the nav fly for a bit!

Today we had NVG academics. We had a couple hours of power point and video instruction, then we went to the NVG room and learned how to adjust them and focus them. Pretty cool stuff. You really have to get the focusing right or you'll give yourself a headache. You wouldn't believe the way a laser lights up a room when you're wearing NVGs.