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Riddller's IFS & UPT Blog

A blog by Riddller in General

  • Entries

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About this blog

IFS first, now my fun at UPT!

Entries in this blog

TD-12

No flying again today. They're not sure when the engines will be fixed, seems to be a fuel control problem. So, we're all hanging out until then. We had some random briefs, then were done by 1400. They mentioned something to the effect of possibly extending our time here so we can finish, if and when they get the stuff fixed. It might be a few days, it might be a few weeks, until it's all taken care of. Oh well! Livin' the dream in the Dirty P!!

5 rides done

Had my fifth ride today, went really well. I needed to do a "pattern only" flight, so this was it. I got like 10 landings in. The aircraft control is pretty much there, and my SA is definitely bigger than most with my prior Nav time, but it's also definitely not where it needs to be. I'm starting to get to the point where I don't have to worry as much about my aircraft control and can start concentrating more on expanding my SA bubble. I missed some stuff today, but it was good training.

TD-5

Crap!! I didn't get to fly today. The weather was fine for the morning, but by the time the afternoon flights were supposed to take off, the storms had rolled in. Oh well, I was rescheduled for tomorrow at 0930. Cross your fingers!! We had CRM and ORM classes when we weren't flying (an hour and a half total), the rest of the time was spent studying in the flight room or listening to other people's briefs or debriefs (they encourage that). There's also a radio in the room that you can use to l

Death by powerpoint!

So today was the first day of Aerospace Phys. Powerpoint all day. We had Physiology in all it's forms, then parachute stuff, and egress. One of the cool parts was night vision (not NVG) and Oxygen intro. They turned off all the lights and had REALLY dark powerpoint slides for the night vision class. You couldn't even see them fully until your eyes adjusted. The Oxygen intro had us in the high altitude chamber (they didn't depressurize it yet) and just ran us through how to use all the stuf

Fast and furious!

Was supposed to do an out and back last Thursday and broke in Arkansas! My IP and I had to drive back to Vance... 4 hours!! That sucked. My cross country started on Friday. We were supposed to go to Amarillo to get gas, then on to Albuquerque for the night. On to Denver on Saturday, then back to Vance on Sunday. Turns out that my plane had an inspection due so we had to come back to Vance on Friday. They had a plane for us on Saturday, so I made it out to Denver on Saturday night. 2 fl

1st day of UPT!

So, I'm back. I had some friends who wanted a better idea of what it was like at UPT, and the blogs they found out there just weren't doing it, so now I'll blog UPT as well! I'm in class 09-05 at Vance AFB. Today was our "official" start date, so now I'm in Phase 1, academics. We're supposed to be done with Phase 1 on 10 March, then we'll move to the flightline and start flying the T-6 in Phase 2. The end of Phase 2 is scheduled for 22 July, and the end of Phase 3 (and winging) on 12 Feb

Lots of sims now

Sorry about no post for a week (again) but it's been kind of boring. I finished all of my flights (except for the one before my Instrument checkride) in the middle of last week, but I still needed like 6 sim missions before I can do my checkride. It pretty much sucks, same-old same-old stuff over and over. I should be doing my checkride on Thursday or Friday though, which I'm excited about. One good thing: We finally got off Formal Release last week (week 10 of Phase II) because everyone fi

Everyone's still here!

So everyone passed the test yesterday. The Navy students had a 96.3% average and the AF students had a 95% average. The Navy guys got a kick out of that, but they've only got 7 students to our 18, no biggie. The rest of the day was taken up with an Anti-terrorism brief, a JAG brief, another brief from the T-38 squadron (this time from the commander) saying, "If you want to be a fighter pilot, don't change your mind while flying the T-6!" This was followed closely by him saying, "Sorry, you g

TD-whatever+3&4

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 fly

Last Block Of Training!

To the Maj at the SUP desk today who reads my blog: here's my next entry, thanks for reading! I've done one of my two low-levels now and have started the last block of formation flying (4 flights) of my training in T-6's. The low-levels are fairly low threat. You only do two of them, the low-level charts are already made up for you, and an Excel sheet calculates all your airspeeds for you. You fly it at a constant 210 knots ground speed, so just adjust your airspeed to maintain your timing

TD-whatever+2

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...

More Form, Shorter Days

Done with 6 form flights now, and it is getting easier to stay in position. I only flew once last week because I messed up my back working on the house last weekend. I wasn't hydrated enough before flying on Friday and we were doing formation aerobatics. All those G's about made me puke! I didn't though, just kept flying. If you puke on any flights after you solo, it's an automatic hook, and we have had two guys in my flight blow chunks on formation flights because you're always looking aro

T-38 Sim Complete

So once you get towards the end of T-6's (at least at Vance), they have you go over and do a T-38 sim. At this point, no one (except for the Navy guys) know what we'll be flying for Phase III, and supposedly this sim has nothing to do with that selection (no one at Vance even sees the results, they just go to Randolph for statistics). Anyway, it was fun. You take off from Randolph AFB in your T-38, and fly an ILS at 250 knots. Then again at 300 knots. Then again at 350 knots. Over and over

Beer light is on!

So they "turned on the beer light" for my flight for the first time this afternoon. It just means you can drink beer in the flight room and tell funny stories about each other. A lot of other flights get it way earlier than we did, but with 5 guys on P-CAP they didn't want to. I also delivered our flight gift -- a kegerator me and some flight-mates built -- to the flight room today, so that probably helped! I had my first flight since my double-turn today too. Dental appointment on Wednesday

Day 1

Yesterday was "Day 0" of the 15-day program (the scripted harassment of the first 15 days on the flightline). They showed us all how it was done yesterday, then we had to perform today (Day 1). That meant us doing the formal brief (that was a cluster-f), then stand-up and shotgun questions. The shotgun questions all come from required reading they give us each day, including the "notes, warnings, cautions" (NWC) out of the Dash-1. There can be up to 7 or 8 NWCs for each emergency procedure (

Chamber day

So we all got our chamber rides today. For those of you not in the know, the "chamber" is a little room they sit you down in, with a bunch of oxygen regulators. They depressurize it up to 35,000 feet, then bring you back down to 25,000 feet. Then they tell you to take off your mask and do really simple things like writing your name and simple math problems. Within a minute or 2 everyone starts feeling different symptoms of hypoxia, and when you feel you could no longer fly an aircraft (i.e.

TD-7

Didn't fly on Friday, but I'm on the schedule Tuesday. Studied a bunch during the day, sat in on some briefs and debriefs, watched others pre-flight the aircraft, and helped some people learn their radio calls. The senior class had their solo party in the afternoon. They basically sat in their flight room drinking beer with their IPs and having funny stories told about them. Some of our class sat in on it (we were all invited, but most were busy, and we couldn't have any of their beer).

Maybe solo tomorrow?

Short post: I was supposed to solo today, but the weather was crap, so I'm on the schedule for it for tomorrow. We have our Friday Standards Test tomorrow, though, which is a huge pain. We've had like a 50% pass rate so far, if that. Now that the 15 day program is over, everything counts, so if I don't pass, I can't fly! Therefore... back to studying!

TD-13.1

Still no flying, but here's an update: There's 14 students left in the senior class. 10 of them are having their last flights waived and will be leaving tomorrow. The other 4 will roll back to my class to do their last few flights. They (DOSS) have 7 aircraft that have never had any problems. They're going to take those 7 aircraft and give them each 8-10 FCFs (Functional Checkflights). Assuming they all run good, they'll use them to start flying us again on Monday. This is still too f

IFS Flash Cards

So I posted this in the IFS thread, but I figured it would be good here too. I made flash cards on the computer for all the boldface and ops limits, to be put on 4 x 6 cards. It's in color, but if you don't have color, the required limits all have asterisks. And the front and backs of the cards are on separate files for those of us who don't have duplex-capable printers. Unfortunately, this Blog program doesn't allow attachments (or I can't figure out how to make it work), so here's a li

Leaving tomorrow...

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 graduatin

Woo hoo! No more blues!

So we passed our 3rd consecutive boldface/ops limits today, so no more blues... unless we bust a test later. They only give the tests every Monday now, though, so we're in flight suits for at least this week. We did a GPS CAI this morning, basically all about how to work the GPS system, and we had our first simulator. We just got in the cockpit and the instructor had us flip all the switches on and off to see what they did, not graded and no biggie, but pretty cool! The avionics on the T-6 a

I'm beat!

Oh man I'm tired. The last bunch of days has been non-stop! We're on the flightline at least 10 hours a day and it's still not enough! At least a couple hours a night is the minimum for studying right now, and we still don't know enough! We had our first weekly stan test on Friday (Standards test) and only one guy in the whole flight passed! Most missed 5 to 8 questions out of 20, and we studied!! So we had to take another test today but the IPs basically went over it first so everyone pas

Long days...

So Thursday and Friday were pretty long. We had to show at 0700 and didn't get out until after 1700. Lot's of CAI's and lectures on Thursday, mostly on Aerodynamics (lift, drag, stalls, spins, etc...) but some intro to the checklists. Friday was a sim day, I got to use one of the ones with the screen which was pretty sweet. It was designed to mostly just get through all the checklists, but my sim instructor let me do a bunch of approaches. They sucked pretty hard at the beginning (that sim is to

Hotel in C-Springs

So, made it to Colorado Spings, after only 10 hours on the road. I checked into the Double Tree hotel, just south of the intersection of Hwy 24 and I-25. Nice place! I told them I was on orders and got the Gov't rate. I don't know if it's any better than the normal rate, but it said Gov't rate on the receipt. $80 a night for the rooms w/ a queen-sized bed, $90 for the king. $80 is the max-lodging in C-Springs, so that's what I took. Big chocolate chip cookie on check-in, I was sold!!

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