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.

San Antonio

Today I had my second review stage ride. It wasn't too bad, but I kept shooting myself in the foot. I haven't flown since last Thursday. I sat SDO on Friday, answering the phone and talking on the radio tracking the flights in the morning. We got canceled yesterday, so today was the first flight of the week for me. I flew a partial-panel (no heading or attitude indicator) ASR approach to start things off, then flew over to Beeville for a GPS approach and circling maneuver to the opposite runway. Those both had two bad moments in them, but were otherwise ok. On the ASR I got really slow at one point, and on the GPS I started descending at an intermediate fix I confused for the final approach fix. I'll have to fly another GPS approach to make up for that, but the SSE circling and missed approach went well. I flew the ILS up at Lackland AFB in San Antonio following that approach.

On the way back I wasn't flying, but the IP thought he had unsafe gear up indications, so we went through the checklist and did a low approach for the tower to check the gear and everything. Everything was fine, but when we got on the ground, we asked why he had called for the gear EP checklist and he couldn't really say. It was a lesson in CRM. He'd had a few gear issues in the past and thought he heard a weird noise, but when he called the gear on the climb checklist he thought he might have actually been looking for gear lights when they were actually supposed to be out. We thought he'd seen something we hadn't but never called him on it. Just a good lesson in assertiveness and speaking up when something doesn't look right. We did the safe thing though.

Not the best day for me, but not the worst either. Early flight tomorrow.

Procedures and Basketball

This morning we finished up our lectures before sims start. One of the AF IPs came in and briefed us on the local procedures for transitioning from Corpus (NGP) to the area, to Cabaniss (NGW), the aux field, and back to Corpus. The local procedures consist of when to switch frequencies, cancel with ATC, what altitudes and headings to fly at which locations, and local landmarks. I finished up the last CAI on normal flying procedures, and we got a brief on CRM. CRM is emphasized even more in this aircraft because we're getting trained to work with a crew from now on, not just an IP. So the CRM consists of utilizing the copilot in the most efficient way possible and learning to see the IP as copilot instead of threat and the observer as a contributing member of the crew.

Intramural basketball picked up again today. We played much better, even with only 7 guys, but still lost even though we had it tied up with 5 minutes to go. I'm just glad to be getting back in shape and hittin' some 3's.