Rolling to backup backups

Today after giving the morning brief I prepped to fly two of the navigation routes we fly. One's the primary and one's the backup. Today though, as my IP and I were on our way to step, the bird status changed and we had to bust out another map of a different route right before we flew. Stuff like that happens more often than you might think. I still managed to fly the low-level ok. It helped that I flew the same route yesterday. I came back to the pattern for a firm touchdown and some sloppy landings. Check tomorrow.

Short day

After giving the morning brief, I sat through a standup, listened to a couple of war stories courtesy of our resident Eagle driver, checked my gradebook, studied a bit, and then we all left. Only four guys were flying, so we all had nothing to do. I swung by finance and changed my pay to get paid once a month, bought some milk and orange juice, and here I am now, about to get an early start on a much-needed weekend. I might go down to the lake today. It's been too long.

This is gettin a little ridiculous

So this has been our 3rd day of no flying. I'm confident we will fly tomorrow though. The weather looks much better.

Today we briefed our flights, but didn't step, just like the last two days. I didn't get a walkaround today because I was FDO("fido"). Answered the phone a couple times, wrote up some accountability forms and gradebook checklists for the IPs. The little office job stuff (AKA arts and crafts) never goes away. As FDO I also had to give the formal brief this morning, which turned out to be a disaster. The Computer folks decided to do something that made all the computers restart 2 minutes after login, so I had to give a hacked together brief with no A/V support reading from random slide printouts that the printer managed to spit out before the computers shutdown. There will be many chances for redemption as the year progresses. I'll have to brief at least once every 2 wks, since we only have 12 guys.

That said, I was really impressed by the help offered to me by my fellow classmates as we struggled to get the day started with seriously broke resources. Everyone asked what I needed and helped me out getting the weather, NOTAMS, the coffee, and figuring out wind corrections for the pattern.

Sim in the morning and flying after lunch. Get up for it.

It Starts

Well, no dollar ride today due to weather, but quite the experience nonetheless.

The morning started of with a demonstration of the formal brief and some shotgun questions sitting at attention.

With the empty schedule, I got a lot of practice in the sims and chairflying today.

We realized just how much we don't know today. Sitting around the flight room listening to the IPs teach and ask us GK really emphasized just how much we need to study more.