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.

See Spotter Watch

Today we had individual report, as in no formal brief! I went in at 1020 this morning. Awesome! The weather was such that I didn't have to go out to the RSU for my spotter upgrade until about 1230. The spotter's job is to sit in the RSU with binoculars and make sure no one lands gear up, calling out normal configuration to the controller and keeping a count of all the patterns that have been flown.

Lazy day.

I had an EP sim later in the day, leaving only one sim remaining for all of the T-6 phase!

I have a low-level map to prep for tomorrow. Should be fun.