All About a Form 24, As If You Care What That Is...

That's pretty much all we've been learning the last few days. Essentially it's the flight log that a nav uses on every flight he goes on, which is pretty much the only written record of where the plane went and when. It's also used to keep track of where the plane is located while you're out there, as well as to calculate how much fuel you have left, and whether you have enough for a detour or whatnot. As usual we proceeded through it at a snails pace, literally a five hour block of class today just covering the front side of the log, which although it involves plenty of calcuations, seems extremely straightforward once you know what you're doing. Monday we have our first "ground mission" in class, where you basically are given info like you would on a real flight, and have to do all the ground planning stages planning out your route, courses, adjustments for winds, fuel requirements, and total distance and time and whatnot. You basically need to come within 1 or 2 degrees or 1-2 miles or 1-2 minutes for the most part, so it's not an exact science. Apparently a week from Tuesday we have most likely our first sim, which will require all of this and a whole lot more, which we're going to get hit with starting tomorrow as we cover the rest of the pages of the log, and then next week when we go more in depth into the radios and what's required of us during departures and approaches.

The appointment went both good and bad, bad because the measurement that is going to be critical in my waiver package is twice as bad as it was before, but good in that the doctor confirmed that my job isn't affected by it and thus the waiver will hopefully be approved. It was supposedly going to be in the system this afternoon after a committee down at Brooks bet this morning to haggle it out and come up with an official recommendation to AETC, after which AETC will have the final say although apparently they almost always go along with the Aerospace Medicine Consultation recommendation from Brooks. Of course flight medicine here hasn't e-mailed me, so they'll probably get around to that tomorrow, if not I'll most likely have to call them myself assuming my flight commander hasn't already moved things along and gotten an answer. Again it won't be the "official" answer but hopefully it will be enough to keep me from being rolled if it's positive.

Okay tip of the day is for those who have joined the latest fad of putting music on your blog. There's a reason I don't do this. Whatever song it is, you had better hope that the first 30 seconds or so is the most amazing piece of music on Earth. Because anytime anyone clicks on any aspect of your page, such as an archive or a comment section to leave a comment, or back to the main page, it starts over. So in reality they aren't hearing this song you think is great, they're hearing what usually becomes a tremendously annoying opening after about five clicks. Besides which they usually don't have volume adjustments built in, so they drown out whatever music the reader is currently listening to. So do us a favor and plug music in your page, we'll go download it or something, but don't bore and deafen us.

Updated the pictures for JSUNT 05-05 as well, e-mail/IM me for the link if you don't have it already.

Pretty Lines on Pretty Maps, er Charts...

Plenty of that today as we started learning about the various procedures to plot routes on a chart, including compensating for turn radius and adjusting for variation and a bunch of stuff that really seems pretty basic. Literally a five hour block of instruction to fill out only a partial flight plan, based on a simple route of like five checkpoints. Some people seemed to have various problems, such as continuously forgetting to convert true north to magnetic north or vice versa, which anyone who knows a minor amount of geography will realize are not the same thing.

He keeps telling us that in the next few days we'll be receiving more information than any other time during nav schol, and I'm really hoping the next week or two are actually challenging. As it is currently it's becoming more like a chore to crawl along at a snail's pace. All for one and one for all, or something.

So tomorrow is the big medical appointment down at Brooks, where they'll probably set in motion the approve/deny action on the waiver. Whether I can get the waiver turned around in about 10 days is another story. Two bridges to cross, and then home free. Theoretically.

In other news, yesterday's temperature reached 107, with a heat index of 114. Guess I won't be running in the afternoons anymore.