More 12 hour days...

Jeez it's hard to catch a free minute in this place!

Last Friday, yesterday and today were all 11 hour and 59 minute days. We haven't gotten out on a Friday before 1930 for 3 weeks! I didn't fly Friday but did two sims, and did a sim and flight both yesterday and today. The day started at 0630 with our Instruments 2 exam. I and most people did well, but we did have two failures. They'll have to get extra training and retest tomorrow.

To show you have fluid the schedule can be, when I left yesterday I thought I was doing a sim in the morning and a flight in the afternoon, so that's what I prepared for. This morning I come in and find I'm just doing two sims, so I prepared for those. An hour later I was thrown onto a flight and then had to go straight to a sim after that without even debriefing the flight! Everything went well though.

Some advice from someone who's doing pretty OK right now: Obviously you need to study the stuff they tell you to study, and chair-fly all your maneuvers and radio calls, and have basic aircraft control (heading, altitude, airspeed). You'll get the aircraft control stuff down pretty quick. What the IPs really want to see after that is that you have a plan before you take off for what maneuvers you're going to do and when you're going to do them, and then just tell him what's going on during the whole flight. If he doesn't say a thing the ENTIRE flight (AND it's not a check ride, those guys just write down what you f-up) then you know you did good. This is exactly what you'll do at IFS, so take that stuff to heart.

That's it for now!