Maybe the Longest Gap Ever?

I really must apologize to those who are used to more regular postings. Things are just different now. I'll update what's happened in Nav school the last couple weeks in this post, and the one following this one will be announcing a change of sorts in this site.

So we started SN a couple weeks ago. I would have posted more regularly about it except for the fact that the academics were just dull and boring. Several hours a day staring at powerpoint slides learning about stuff that would be much easier to learn hands on. Eventually we got some time in a Computer Based Training (CBT) class to play around with the radar, but due to the sims being full we didn't get the hands on training with taking radar fixes and what not that most classes do, putting us at a disadvantage going into the first sim having never actually seen the radar in action.

The first sim went somewhat well, although I was certainly out of my comfort zone when it came to being on top of things all the time. There was a lot of stuff added in with both the Radar and the INS making an appearance in our checklists and general procedures, and I certainly was a lot busier. I scored pretty well given it was the first sim, although as usual I felt I could have done better. This was especially true when it came to our first flight.

They ended up sending us on a different routing than we'd planned due to a Military Operations Area going active in our path, so we had to literally navigate on the fly towards points we hadn't prepped for. In reality this is exactly the type of stuff we'll be doing in the Real World(tm) but we'll have much more advance equipment to help us and will be doing less by hand. I also randomly got assigned lead on the way out, so I was the one in control of turning the jet all the way to the turnpoint. In the midst of trying to figure out how to take radar fixes on the much weaker scope in the jet in comparison with the sim, I managed to not kill enough of the drift continuously and we wandered at least 10 miles north of course on the way out to the turnpoint. Eventually I corrected the error with a big correction back to the turnpoint, and ended up hitting it almost exactly, and rolling out within a mile of the return course. Luckily for me after passing the lead to someone else they immediately made a correction 12 degrees in the wrong direction, sending us somewhere around 20 miles off course to help everyone forget about my gaffe previously. Highlight of the mission for me was not missing a single altitude call, which is a 4 that is always difficult to get. That and a perfect EP quiz and flight and fuel plan left me with a pretty good feeling coming out, and I ended up with 1 more 4 than I did 3's, which was better than I expected for my first flight.

We have another four or five flights and another five or six sims however, so I still have a lot of work to do and a lot of major mistakes to not make between now and the scarf drop. The final academic hiccup was hurdled today with the SN academic test. It was 40 questions which is many more than usual, but in my opinion that helped because missing one wouldn't drop your percentage as much as previously. As it turned out my studying all the review questions continuously during the academic classes paid off, as I managed my 3rd 100 of the course. Those go along with my four minus 1 grades, so I'll need to ace the next one to even out my average at something like 98 point something. There are people that have been acing their way through for the most part, but hopefully that's good enough for somewhere in the upper middle or whatnot. It's the flights and sims that I feel will be the point where I gain ground, so I'll just have to make sure to prepare as much as I have been for those. It is a damn good feeling getting 100 though, you know that you didn't lose ground to anyone in the rankings, and better yet you gained ground or increased the gap on a whole lot of people.

The girlfriend is making an appearance tomorrow night for the weekend, the last time I will see her before she returns to Germany until Christmas or so, a five month gap. It won't be easy, but we knew that in advance.

As aforementioned, significant changes announced in the next post, probably Sunday or Monday.