Riddller

We've got a former Buff Nav at my base who cracked is tail-bone when a pilot landed too hard (I'm not kidding). He's permanently DNIF, but is a mission planner now. Down side: He's retireing as a 20-year Capt in a few months.

"Big engine, lightweight, Hippy-car. This should be fun!" Classic!

Our planning guys use www.flashearth.com. It combines all the different imagery sites out there into one page. I'm sure they'd love to get their hands on this software, I'll send it along. Will it work on, say, Terraserver or any of the other imagery options on Flashearth?

Not true. On Marine Herks we had the JFTR copied and memorized to get what we were entitled to. There was more than one occassion we pulled out the "crew integrity" line. Granted, in a war situation, everything becomes "suck it up", but if we weren't flying beans, bullets, band-aids, or gas in the sand box (which I never got the opportunity to do BTW), then we made sure we got our entitlements.

I won't comment on whether or not you need to "look good in a combat zone", but the new covers do look way better in general, definitely not .

Wow... Here we go again!

Another Marine's view: You're not as right as you think you are. A butter bar is treated pretty much the same in every service, unless people know you're prior-E AND you're not a douche-bag. And even then there's no gaurantee that you'll be treated a little better. The Marine's are no different than the AF in this regard.

Probably a dumb question for most of you, but my casual buddies and I were talking about this... what is the "LPA"?

So I guess I had to have one more post. It's tougher than I thought leaving my flight. Every single one of them are great guys and I see them doing fantastic things for the Air Force. As of the time I'm writing this, (Friday night at 2300 hours) we have one guy who washed out, and another guy who decided it wasn't for him. I wish them both the best of luck. That brings the grand total (so far) to 3 guys saying it's just not for them, and one not making it through, for a 15% "not graduating" rate. I gotta say, I had a really good time here, met some fantastic people in the class before me, definitely in my class, and in the class after me. I know many of those of you whom I'm talking about read this, and I want want to say thanks for making it a heck of a lot better than it could have been!! In my time as crew on the Herk, I learned that what makes a flight good is not where you go, but the people you're with. I was once broke in Pohang Korea in December for 2 weeks, living on cots in tin-huts with kerosene heaters, but had a great crew and it made it an awesome time. I've also been broke in Hawaii with a crappy crew and it sucked. Thanks for making this one of the good times!! Best of luck to you all, and to all you future IFS students!

Glad to hear you made it! ...speedy!! And no, he didn't make it through. And a certain asian guy who's name starts w/ K decided he didn't really want to be a pilot either, so he's taking off too. Keep in touch!! I'll be back at work Wednesday, so give me time to clear out my mailbox and send me an e-mail on global. Later!!

Nothing you should worry about studying for now, they teach everything you need to know during academics. I got asked stuff like "What are the 4 left-turning tendencies and how do they work?" "What is that thing?" [pointing to something on the plane] "What is max ramp weight?" etc...

I've tried a couple different places, and I like Loco Liquors down on 1st and Santa Fe. the other places had taps that didn't work so we had to keep going back to get new ones. Plus, Loco has a bunch of high-end beers in their kegs too, if you want to pay the extra. As for the weekends, some people have gone whitewater rafting, people have brought their motorcycles and gone riding through the mountains, hiking, whatever!

WAHOO!!! I'm DUN!!! Did my checkride first go this morning. I had some mistakes, like everyone does, but overall did great. They have checkride gouge books here with info on every instructor. It tells you what knowledge questions they like to ask, what kind of stuff they have you do during flight, what emergency procedures they run you through, etc... You just study those and glance through all the stuff you've been studying for the last 5-6 weeks and your good!! They tell you over and over again that there's no such thing as a perfect checkride. They expect you to make mistakes, but they also expect you to recognize them and do your best to fix them. Overall, it doesn't take very long and isn't a big deal, unless you make it one. So, it's Wednesday and they're making me stick around until the weekend because I'm the class leader. The guy who finished yesterday got to leave today. That's fine, it's just more time for me to NOT have to look at OPRs and EPRs!! Plus, our solo party is Friday, and I'm grabbing another keg for it, YES! I think I'm going to spend some time consolidating most of the "good to know before you get here" knowledge into one document and send it to Mr. Baseops. We'll see how that goes. So I guess this is my last entry for this blog, I'm sure none of you will really care about my drive back home. If you're reading this and you haven't gotten your questions about IFS answered, feel free to PM me!! Later all! Thank you, and goodnight...

Nope, no E6-Bs, CR-3s, etc... Just visual and the GPS. They actually didn't let me use the GPS on my checkride, I only got to use the VOR.

Not much to report. Two more flights today and I did well enough. My final checkride is tomorrow. If you're the praying type, a little something sent up to your particular omniscient being would be most appreciated!! I also posted some more pics in the gallery if anyone is interested. Later!!

So I had my solo today, along with about 5 other guys. It was a blast. You have to do all your solo landings to a full stop then taxi back to the runway, but it's not a big deal. The problem comes in when you FORGET to do your full stop and just do a touch-and-go! Enter me... they understood that you build the habit patterns based on touch-and-go's, but they were still pissed after I told them about it (no one knew, the IPs were driving to the tower to watch us when I did it!). Oh well, the called me a dumbass and that was the end of it (tower had actually cleared me for the option). I went on my next flight in the syllabus this afternoon too. The IP was a former F-15 driver, and about scared the crap out of me!! We were doing stalls, and he tells me, "I don't want you to go to the buffet, I want you to go to loss of control." For those of you non-flyers, when doing stall practice, you normally (in the civilian world) go until the plane starts shaking (the buffet). He wanted me to keep going. So I was doing a turning-to-the-right, power-on stall, felt the buffet, then the plane flipped on me!! The right wing immediately fell to about 90-100 degrees of roll and then the nose then dropped to about 60-70 degrees nose down. I pulled out of it no problem, but about crapped my pants! He tells me, "Nice job, it looked good!" Are you flippin' kidding me? The least he could have done would have been to brief me about it ahead of time!! My next interesting experience was back in the pattern. We were doing a no-flap landing and he tells me. "Keep pulling the nose up to keep it off the runway, and we'll have a nice landing." I've heard this before, so it made sense. This time, though, during the flair, he keeps saying, "Pull it back, pull it back..." So I do, and have a perfect landing... along with the tail of the aircraft. He asks if I heard the the tail drag, and I told him I'd rather not say what I heard! He asks again seriously, and I tell him that yes, I think I dragged the tail for half a second. He says no big deal, it was a very minor scrape if we did, don't worry about it. So after landing, he looks at it, says sure enough we did, but didn't do any damage (there's a piece back there designed for that). So that was my crazy flying day!! I have two more flights tomorrow, then they are having me skip two flights and go straight to final check. I should be done Wenesday, then get to go home Saturday. Everyone else gets to go home as soon as they finish, but they want to "keep the class leader around". Oh well...

Did my checkride yesterday, went well, I passed no problem. I actually thought I busted standards on a couple of the maneuvers, but the IP said they're more looking for people who notice when they bust and try to correct right away, which I did. I solo with like 5 other people on Monday. Everyone in the class should be checking within the next few days, then doing their solo's. Yes, they are back to letting us solo by ourselves in the pattern. I've got 5 more flights in the syllabus after my solo before I do my final checkride, and I think they are going to double-turn me every day until I'm done (I asked them to). My civilian flight commander didn't seem to like the idea because it meant he would lose his class leader, but it's not like I'm doing a whole lot. If they don't advance me anymore, and I double-turn everyday, I should check on Thursday. If they advance me a few flights again (which they probably will) then I'll check on Wednesday. I hope it works out!! We finished up yesterday at about 1500 so I went and grabbed the keg. We tapped it and started grilling at about 1700, and the keg was floated by about 2230! We got into a massive beer-pong tournament, so the beer went fast... That's about it from here! Hopefully I should be home by the end of next weekend! Later!

Flight went good again yesterday, getting ready to fly again here in a couple hours. The new class is supposed to start flying Monday. I was told yesterday that they want to proficiency advance me. Same with the other guy in my class with a PPL. We're supposed to have 6 flights in this "block" of instruction, but they want us to skip the last two flights and go straight to the pre-solo checkride. So I've got one more flight today, then my checkride on Saturday. Oh yeah, everyone is flying Saturday, briefing at 0600. Uggh!! Guess we'll have to hold off on the keg and burger-burn until Saturday afternoon! Groundhog day...

Groundhog day... Rained in the morning, the first two lines on the schedule didn't go (12 flights). I was 4th go, had a good time. We went to another airfield about 20 min away and did nothing but pattern work. Finally got the slips down, and nailed centerline on every landing... woohoo!! The next class is supposed to start flying on Saturday. Not much else is new, like I said, groundhog day...