Fam 1

I flew today for the first time in 5 months. It was great to get back in the air. My wingman took off, and did the highwork first (speed change, level turns, and slow flight). We swapped about and hour into it, I did my highwork, then transitioned to the aux field Navy Cabaniss. We broke over the numbers and flew about 10 touch-and-go's. We switched seats again in the landing pattern and my wingman finished up his pattern work and flew back to land at Navy Corpus where we got a downwind entry for the full stop landing. This aircraft seems to be very forgiving in the landing transition. I'm sure the wheel struts are taking a beating, since it's a Navy plane, but hopefully it won't be such a fight to land it well. Good feedback and plenty to work on tomorrow when it'll be my turn to start up and do the takeoff.

Fam 0

So Fam 0 turned out to be pretty chill. We've evidently won the lottery with a great on-wing. She's supposed to be one of the better instructors. She explained everything clearly and succinctly. She showed us how to get and aircraft, check the book, compute the weight and balance, and how to get the dash-1 weather report of the Navy weather site. We went over briefing expectations and how thorough our systems knowledge is expected to be. After the tour of the hangar and a cursory explanation of the preflight inspection, we briefed the landing pattern and the course rules/local procedures for transitioning to Cabaniss, our auxiliary landing field. Not to bad, so hopefully a weekend of studying will pay off on Monday.

Days that make you go 'arg'

This morning I drove to work in thick fog, that probably kept all the student sorties from taking off. The sim itself went ok. We had a different instructor though, a new guy right off the flight line, which means he's a young guy who's been teaching actual T-44 flying much more recently then the old guys who usually have 10-20 years or more between the last military flying they did and the simulator instructing they do now. So what followed, was a much more realistic 3 hours of instruction in the sim. It actually made me angry that they've spent the past 3 sorties blowing sunshine at us instead of pushing me to learn the next thing, but I guess that's part of taking charge of your own education. He gave us much better insight into what will be expected of us for the ground briefing on the flight line with our on-wing instructor (Fam 0, tomorrow) and for the first flight (Fam 1). So on top of that I got into a really frustrating PIO as I was trying to fine tune the descent rate and airspeed on a practice ditch. Ditching is where the pilot flies the aircraft into the water on purpose, because it's the only option left, usually due to a fuel leak and subsequent fuel starvation, dual engine failure and no luck with the restarts, or ridiculously poor planning. A PIO is a pilot induced oscillation in which the pilot overcorrects when making inputs to the flight controls or power levers. Looking forward to 5 hours of academic interrogation tomorrow.