FN in a Nutshell.
 
Ok so I really should never get this far behind again.  Man is it a daunting task to try to catch up.  This post will basically sum up the last few weeks of FN so if you're interested in Nav school read on, if not skip to the next one.

When last I talked a bunch about it I'd just had my first full tasking sim.  T2401 or T2FAIR01 as many people call it is the first sim during which you have to do basically everything at once.  To that point you've done departures and arrivals, and you've done some enroute nav, and in separate computer ground missions you've done all the chart and log work, but 2401 is the first time you put it all together and do a full mission.  It certainly wasn't easy, but I managed to get through the whole thing with eight 4's out of a possible twenty with the rest 3's.  Felt pretty good about it, 2's abounded on various other gradesheets.

After that came our 3rd and 4th flights in the jet, which were basically the same as the second but on different routes.  I actually got to fly three of the four routes during FN, so I won't have to worry about being totally clueless when it comes to hitting some of those routes in other phases.  The third flight was actually pretty significant as I was S9, which meant I was in charge for the entire return portion of the mission.  After the turnpoint S5 called over the radio asking if I was ready for the lead, and as usual me saying "Roger I have the lead" was quite a neato feeling.  A few minutes later I ordered a turn and a 50 ton jet immediately obeyed.  Not that I'm power tripping or anything but you know how guys are with their toys.  Sadly on this one I realized how important comms are, as I missed just one thousand to level call out of about thirty comms we had to make , and that dropped me from a 4 to a 3 in that category.  Overall on that one got ten 4's out of 19 possible.  On the fourth flight which was the one immediately prior to the checkflight I blew all previous scoresheets away by scoring sixteen 4's out of a possible 19, basically having a near perfect flight.  I was well into the swing of things by then, and was even having time to look out the window and enjoy the view from six miles up.

Then came the check flight.  Between the check flight and the check sim, that is a huge chunk of the grading for this phase.  I started off bad missing an EP, and continued bad by being outside the 4 margin of error on my fuel.  I then missed two altitude calls enroute, and I guess the added stress was having an effect.  At one point I glanced at my gradesheet when he was leaning over and grading a fix, and all I saw were several 3's at the top.  Not at all what I was hoping to receive on the flight.  As it was afterwards, it turned out the first seven scores were 3's, but later in the debrief I pointed out an error in the computer gradesheet and had one changed to a 4.  The good news was all the rest of the scores were 4's, giving me 13 out of 19.  The most exciting thing about it was I passed, as failing a checkride of any type is always really bad news.  I'd hoped for a few more 4's, but I couldn't complain all that loudly.  My first check of any kind of nav school was over, but throughout my career they'll always be marked as times of increased stress.

Then came our 5th sim out of 7, with the last eventually being the checkride.  On this one I managed during the spin to mismeasure a distance by over 120 miles.  We use the dividers to measure distances but they only span about 200, so for more than that you usually span out about 60 or 120 and then "walk" them down the courseline and add it all up to get the total.  Well I spanned 120 and then counted 102 or so beyond that, but just forgot to add in the original 120, so I had 102 instead of 222 for the ground distance on that line.  Word to the wise always use your plotter to double check all your distances, it only takes about 30 seconds total and is accurate enough that you'll spot these gross errors.  The good news is I recovered to have perfect comms in the sim, and overall ended up with an outstanding sixteen 4's out of 20 my best on a sim to that point.

Up next was the 6th sim, which is used to make sure we're ready for the checksim.  Pretty uneventful sim in general, with the only highlight being someone in my four person group busting the EP quiz and thus fairing the ride before it even started, never a good idea.  One of my only mistakes must have been fat fingering my NCS present position for where we took off, because the first time I plotted it on the chart it was off by like three degrees of longitude, so it wasn't even on the map.  Other than that I had another outstanding sim, and scored my highest to that point with seventeen 4's out of 20.

Then came everyone's greatest fear, the checksim.  Checkflights are somewhat stressful, as everything you're doing is being looked at under a microscope, but the routes are really straight line out and back, and the pilot's fly the departure and approach so you're really not responsible for all that much.  In the sim, a totally different story.  You make all the calls, you run the departure and approach, and you're doing all the log and chart work along the way.  Because of the exactness they can control of things such as wind, in the sim you are only allowed a corridor of ten miles either side of centerline.  If your max deviation is more than 10 miles, even 10.1, you have faired the ride and will have to reperform it the next day.  Worse yet is we spin thte day before, so you'll actually spin for a new one the next day, and then check the day after that, when you normally would have had two days off.  Sucks to be those guys.  Going into our spin we knew that three people from A section had bombed it and would be respinning the same day as us, so we were all really trying to not be that guy.

Our spin was dead silent for the entire 100 minutes, as we all tried to figure out what horrible error we had made prior to timing running out.  There were some major issues with some people, from misplotting a point by a full degree of latitude or longitude, to putting all the true courses under mag and converting the wrong way, to highlighting the wrong high elevation point even though Mt Whitney as the highest in the continental US (climbed it previously) was near centerline, to miscalculating fuel by a thousand pounds, to having a total time off by over 10 minutes... There really was a laundry list of stuff that everyone did wrong.  It's just the added stress of knowing every single thing is important I guess.  Interestingly enough the hit on my chart that dropped me down to a 3 was that I didn't draw my concentric circles around my emergency airfields with a template, and instead did them freehand.  Nowhere does it say a template is a requirement in our training manual, but apparently that's the way we were taught.  That's one of those mistakes you only make once I guess, although I really don't feel it even matters.  Even more so, that it certainly doesn't matter enough to drop me to a 3, the same score many people who had horrible misplots got.  My flight plan and fuel plan were error free though, which is always possible but amazing hard to achieve at times.  You always think you were fine, but being off by just .2 on the fuel or +-2 on many of the flight plan sections like drift instantly drops you out of the 4 range.

The checksim itself was definitely the first time I began noticing the effect stress was having on me.  I made some really REALLY stupid mistakes near the beginning as I was trying to work into my comfort zone.  Unfortunately our route when compared with A sections was much more complicated, with an almost immediate step up altitude at departure, and an arc for an approach instead of a straight in.  Very early on I forgot to switch frequencies and called Tower again instead of Departure to report my altitude once safely airborne.  Upon switching to Departure I was then so flustered about jacking that up that my call was "Gator 03 level with you at 318.6" which was the frequency rather than the altitude, which would have made a whole lot more sense.  Enroute was pretty uneventful, my only hit was putting the wrong times on my unscheduled alter points on the chart, although they were fine on the log.  Coming back down though I was so focused on my point to point calculations to get to the Initial Approach Fix (IAF) because that is what I'd screwed up the day prior that I totally blew right through the altitude calls as we came down to the 3,000 altitude from 33,000.  It takes several minutes to get down there, and if you get focused on something else on the way down it's easy to end up missing that instrument in your scan.  From what I heard though nearly everyone missed those calls.

Coming out I felt relatively good about how I'd score, because I was basically positive I didn't bust corridor, miss the IAF by more than 3 miles, or do any of the other things people usually end up busting the ride for.  I knew I'd probably take a hit for crew coordination for the missed calls and jacked up frequencies, but those were the only errors I could come up with.  As it was I was later surprised with a couple more including those concentric circles and miswritten times on the unscheduled alter, but amazingly enough those were my only three hits.  I scored seventeen 4's out of 20, tying my highest score ever, and I'd done it on the most important sim of all thus far.  My scoresheet for FN is now complete, and strung across the bottom of the page is an Excellent on every line.  Better yet in the entire phase combined I only received four 2's, with those all coming on early rides.  Then came 77 3's, which is a whole lot, but thankfully the number of 4's was much higher at 134.  Not quite twice as many 3's as 4's, but that's somewhat deceiving, as in the two events that are most heavily weighed I received 30 4's and 9 3's. 

These last couple days I've been feeling pretty damn good about my progress in nav school thus far.  I basically got through the entire FN phase without screwing anything major up.  My gradesheet is pretty close to spotless thanks to my strong performance of late, and I did very well on the two events that will count the most towards class ranking.  On academic tests I've still never missed more than one, which should place me relatively decently in that category as well.  There's a whole lot of red ink on our flight room board at the moment, with basically a lot of names of people who either got a 2 on something when a 3 was required on these later rdies, or are on the Commander Awareness Program for Officership or Academic purposes, or various other negative things.  Thus far I've avoided having my name on the board for anything other than having to pay a quarter for a couple gradesheet errors.  We've had Thursday and Friday off, so I'm on the 3rd day of a 4 day weekend, and thus finally able to relax and catch up on this blog.

My goals for the first few months of nav school have been relatively simple.  Rank high enough in the class by the end of Systems Navigation (SN the next phase that will be six weeks long) that I won't have to go the EWO track, something I've decided is definitely not a good fit for me.  My other was to not screw anything up in a big way.  Thus far I've achieved both of those goals.  In the next week or two they're going to pull us aside and go over our folders and let us know where we stand in the class, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the situation is.  One thing I keep forgetting that is actually quite important is of the top few people in the class, some of them might go EWO after SN, and thus they won't be competing for the same slots I will.

We're down to 32 nav student sin our class due to people rolling and dropping out.  After SN in about six weeks we'll lose the EWO's, something like 5-6 of them putting us at 27.  After Global Navigation (GN) we'll lose the Navy guys, who were never competing with us anyway, which means 9 more drop off putting us at 18.  If anyone else rolls which is likely between now and the end, the number will be even smaller.  From what I've heard, by the end of SN the rankings are pretty tough to sway in any real direction, as the people on top tend to stay there unless they choke on something huge.  It's a lot easier to fall down in a hurry than climb up basically, so I'm ecstatic that the initial tough phase has gone so well.

Interestingly enough, there was another side effect of performing well lately.  Yesterday I was stopping by the flight office to check the board and my flight commander told me to come in and close the door, which caused instant fear to ripple through my brain.  As it turned out it was for a "coronation" of sorts.  Our initial section leader had been removed from the position a few weeks prior, for reasons I'm not really sure.  They then passed the job over to a guy who was A section's leader before rolling into our class, so he already knew the duties.  Apparently he bombed the checksim the first time around, and I'm not sure how the second time went, all I know is that I guess my cc thought he didn't need extra duties slowing him down.  He actually has a wife and family so I can totally understand that, I have no idea how I'd get through nav school while trying to juggle all that at home.

So there you have it, yours truly is now the B section leader.  It's a double edged sword really.  It's a spotlight, which means good things when it comes to ranking and visibility in front of the flight commander which will eventually count in the grand scheme of things.  Unfortunately, it will also be an even bigger spotlight if I screw anything up.  It is now infintesimally more important that I'm on time to everything, and don't do anything stupid.  And basically if anyone else does anything stupid then it falls on me to take the blame and eventually solve the problem.  I'm excited that my cc has faith in me, but I'm wondering which edge of the double edged sword will be sharpest.

So there you have it, the last few weeks in a nutshell.  Expect another post soon about the workings on the social side of my life outside the squadron.  Things are good.  Really good.

Erm...
 
Okay so I'm still a bit behind.  A bit meaning truckloads.  Well here's the story.  This morning we have the spin for our checksim, the most important graded event thus far in nav school.  Tomorrow we have the actual checksim.  That by itself is worth something like 25% of the graded measures of this phase.  The check flight was worth 25%, the rest of the graded measures combined (about 15 or something) are worth 25%, and the academic tests are worth 25%.  On top of all that comes a flight commander ranking which you can't really plan on, but those are the hard numbers.
 
So anyway, after tomorrow, I'll be done with the Fundamentals of Navigation (FN) phase completely, apparently the hardest phase in Nav school.
 
We then have Thursday and Friday off, and I'll be using at least part of that four day weekend to update this blog.  A truckload of mushy stuff, and a huge recap of the nav school events of late.