Survival, Sort Of...

Man, falling a bit behind here. Luckily my section has a flex day today so I have nothing to do but stuff like make my bed and fold clothes and post blogs.

We'll start with the nav school stuff as it's pretty brief. On Monday we headed into the altitude chamber for a spin, and that was good times. Initially one of my ears was giving me issues, probably as a result of the cold over the weekend. Eventually though after some prodding there was a satisfying pressure release (pop) and I had no problems for the rest of the journey up to 35,000 feet. Got some sweet pictures of myself in the helmet and oxygen mask, looking like a fighter pilot extraordinaire or something. There were all sorts of demonstrations that took place while we were in there, including a night vision one where we got to see what happens when we go on and off of oxygen and try to focus on text and colors. The funny part was the hypoxia demonstration, where one half of us then the other took off our masks at 25000 or so and then waited the three to five minutes for hypoxia to set in. Some people felt symptoms almost immediately and had to get right back on oxygen, but I ended up barely feeling anything for quite a while. A bit warmer and more dizzy than usual, and apparently I had some nice cyanosis (blue lips/fingernails) goin, but other than that I was still able to do math problems and whatnot even late in the period. You can definitely tell the difference when you put the mask back on though... Then it was the other side's turn and we got our chance to laugh at them and their symptoms. One of the typical ones is euphoria, so people suddenly get very smiley and giggly which is funny to watch.

Eventually we returned to earth and got ready for the second portion of the chamber, the rapid decompression or "rapid D" as they called it. Basically they put us in a separate smaller chamber at sea level and took the main one up to 16,000 or so, and then basically opened the door which caused the whole thing to equalize at around 10,000. They ran us through the steps of gangloading the regulator and putting on the "quick-don" as it's called, but then gave us some long boring information with the phrase "a rapid D could happen at any TIME" being the buzz word, after which the technician outside initiated it, which basically scares the bejeezus out of you because it sounds like a mild explosion that you're totally not expecting. We all got on oxygen in a hurry without any problems though, so I came out of the whole experience pretty confident with the equipment that I'll probably very rarely ever use.

The next day was spent entirely on survival, most of which was pretty boring, only because we'll have to go over this much more in depth when we go to Fairchild for land and Pensacola for water, and this was just a brief runthrough in case something happens to one of our T-43s. It's not like landing somewhere in west Texas would require living off the land for a month and instead we'd probably be found within the hour, but hey. We then had a test immediately the next day which was yesterday, and I managed to miss one again. Interestingly enough there was one almost half the class missed that I got right, but it might get thrown out which means there will be a lot of 100s, and I'll be stuck with having missed one yet again. It's amazing how long it has been since I've aced any kind of test. Well they only get harder, so I guess if I keep up the minus one pattern and everyone else drops, I'll be doing ok.

Still gotta blab a bit about the weekend, probably tomorrow. We start Aviation Preflight Indoctrination (API) tomorrow, so I hear it's a lot of memorization of regulations and whatnot, and the test is pretty tough. I've become my section's photographer, so I've got a site up with the guy from the other section with tons of pictures from the last few weeks, and it will be updated throughout the course. IM me if you want the link.