Spread Your Wings, and Prepare to Fly.

The day I'd been waiting for since I entered the AF finally came on Friday. "Gator eight six alpha, cleared for takeoff runway one four left..." Eventually on my resume I'll have some block about having 1,000 or even 2,000 or 3,000 flight hours in various aircraft, but as of now that number stands at 2.9. There were really three favorite moments for me for that first flight. The first was as usual, just plugging in to the radio and hearing everyone's voices crackling over my headset, from the pilot to the guy in the seat next to me. It's like they have a channel into your brain, so you can hear them clearly even over the noise of the engines and whatever else. That and you can hear yourself, which isn't something you're used to hearing at a higher volume. One of the things we do in an early checklist is do a mic check through the plane, and you basically hear "I3 loud and clear, S10 loud and clear, S9 loud and clear" all the way up to the front to the pilots. The instructors are referred to by I, the students take up the positions S1-S12. S1 is "lead" which means a lot of the tasking falls on his shoulders, which can be either a good or bad thing. Generally S1 is responsible for navigating the departure and approach, S5 takes the outbound enroute leg, and S9 the inbound. I was S10 Friday, but since all we did was three different departures and approaches, we all ended up lead for one of the legs.

My second favorite moment came somewhere around level off at FL230 (Flight Level at 23,000 basically) when I got a chance to look out the window. Out there on the wing, high above the clouds, was the insignia that is on most Air Force aircraft. It was a pretty neat feeling to realize that I was in fact in a plane, thousands of feet in the air, and I was going to get to do this for a job, and even get paid. Basically it's like being accepted onto a team that's the world's best, and everyone loves being the best.

The third moment was during the changeover from the third departure to the third approach, when S9 came on the headset and said "S10 you have the lead." "Roger S10 has the lead" was my immediate response, and I was then in control of a piece of machinery that weighs about fifty tons inflight. All I had to say was "Pilot, Lead, Left 350" and the plane would immediately bank in that direction. Altitude changes, radio calls, turns, it was all great fun. It's a little more pressure to be the one in charge, as a whole lot of people are watching you screw up if you manage to. So far so good though, only a couple of the leads had us going off into the boonies requiring the pilots to make a turn on their own to stay within the corridor given to us by ATC.

Criticism is for the most part immediate on the plane. If you're not lead all the altitude and turn calls have to be communicated to your instructor before lead makes them, so your instructor knows you would have done the same or even what you would have done differently. For example for the 1000 to level off call, we have to point at our altimeter at 1500 to level off. At times though you'll be absorbed in a calculation and you'll hear lead come over the radio with the 1,000 to L/O, and immediately think "well crap" and try not to miss the next one. Even worse is the pilot coming over the radio if you're lead and saying "we're turning to x heading because we're getting way right/left of course."

Each position also has a number of additional duties, mostly referring to an emergency egress situation, but also some referring to flight preparation. I managed to draw being the lunch guy, so I was dropped off at the flight kitchen to pick up all the food we'd ordered when we arrived and signed in in the morning. I was quite impressed, $1.40 got me a chicken patty sandwich, chips, apple, pudding, jello, gum, a Snickers, a Nutri-Grain bar, orange juice, and a beverage of our choosing. And believe it or not that was the SMALL lunch, the larger one for a buck more apparently got people two sandwiches and various other things. I might spring for that on Monday for our second flight and just save the extra stuff and eat it later. During the full flights which we start Monday there is a lot more downtime, as you're up for 3-4 hours and have a lot of time between checkpoints assuming you're not crazily off course. We managed to not have anyone barf, although I must admit during all the step down altitudes on the approaches I was feelin pretty crappy. I'm gonna try wearing the wristbands that apply pressure inbetween those two major veins that I used to wear for reading in cars or riding boats on scuba trips, and that should eliminate that problem. Interestingly enough climb outs, and even turbulence had no effect. For the first two approaches we just buzzed the airfield, and it was literally an immediate improvement in the way I was feeling as soon as we did.

I did get a 2 for mission prep, largely because I hadn't cluttered up my chart with much of anything, figuring after the first flight I would know what I needed and what I didn't. And I was right, I know what needs to be added, and what some people have on theirs that is a total waste of time and a visual mess. The rest were 3's with the sole 4 coming from acing the EP quiz. Speaking of which we had the full Emergency Procedure test Thursday, and I managed to ace it extending my streak of acing tests to a whopping two. The party never stops though, on Wednesday we have our FN test, which covers all of the academics learned during this phase. That will require a lot of legwork to prep for.

I continue to try to get into a more regular updating schedule, and this week is going to be a much more ideal schedule for that among other things. We have our 2nd Flight Monday as I mentioned, but I drew the noon show time rather than the 6:30am, so that'll be nice. Probably won't be back until after dinner, luckily they give us all that food on the plane. Tusday we just have some CRM (Crew Resource Management) work in the morning, then after lunch a test review and a briefing by the 563rd about why we should go EWO. I'm pretty much sold on the other side of the house, but shoudl at least be educational. Wednesday morning is the FN academic test, but we'll be home by lunch. Assuming we don't fail the test that means we don't have to come in until 1pm Thursday, where we'll be spinning (doing all the calculations) for our fourth sim which although it has the identifier T2401 has been nicknamed Twenty FAIR O One because of the amount of problems usually ran into apparently. Basically it's the first time we'll be lead for an entire flight from departure to arrival, so juggling comms as well as all the log work should be interesting. The great news in that respect though is we get both Friday AND Monday off for the Fourth of July weekend, so we'll end up with several days to prep for the sim the following Tuesday. It's about time we've gotten some love from the scheduling department, we'd been getting the real shaft in prior weeks.

So yeah, less frequent updates have hopefully been made up for my lengthier ones, although I'm going to continue to try and update more often. I know I was desperate to read a nav journal before I came here and there basically wasn't any, so I'm doing what I can to help out everyone else.

Oh and since she much prefers it when I mention her in posts, last night in honor of my girlfriend I went to see The Notebook. I generally prefer drama and action, and she gernally prefers romance and comedy, so I actually saw one of each to broaden my horizons a bit. This was actually an excellent movie for its genre, and gets a solid 5.5 M's. The difference between 5 and 6 was that I ALMOST cried, but managed to choke back a few. Quite a touching love story, and enough to make you miss someone a whole lot. To cheer myself up I hopped over to Dogeball next door, which I'd heard from multiple sources was the funniest movie of the year by far. Yeah, 2 M's. It was as usual more of a "stupid funny" than "funny funny" as I call it, and I really wasn't too impressed. The most interesting part of the movie was trying to figure out how old Marsha Brady is at this point, and whether the Brady Bunch was on in the 70s or 80s. Luckily I continue my streak of hopping to crappy movies and not having to be really sad that I actually paid to see them, and paying for those that are actually worth my time.

So yeah, three weeks from yesterday and we'll (most likely) get to have dinner together or something assuming getting plane tickets and whatnot goes smoothly. Not really sure how I'll feel during or after the 12 hours or so we'll get to say hi. Something tells me I'll never take her for granted at any point when we're finally together, that's for sure.