Solo and Midphase!

It has been too long since I have last written something down and too much stuff to talk about since then. I will do my best to illustrate what exactly I have been doing for the past month or so. Last I left off I was about to solo…..well that definitely happened and I didn’t die so I will begin from there. It was very interesting because I was very excited but not nervous about soloing. I had been waiting all week to be able to solo….I knew I was ready. Usually the way it works is you fly in the morning with your instructor to see if you are ready and then in the afternoon you fly your solo. My solo was a little different due to some meteorological conditions (weather); I flew my pre-solo ride but because the winds picked up I could not fly that same afternoon. I ended up having to get special permission to fly my solo the next day without a pre-solo ride. The day of I was surprised to be so calm and composed about what I was about to do….I guess I really hadn’t thought it through totally…..I was not over anxious or nervous about the flight all day; at least most of the day was like that. In the civilian world most of the time your instructor pilots will fly with you and then you come back and they get out and you go up for the remainder of the time. Here however you step to the jet on your own without an IP; no supervision. I use that word simply because that’s what a lot of pilot training is, supervision; No one to see if you preflight the jet properly, to see if you start the jet properly, just no one. It is the coolest feeling in world stepping to your first military aircraft by yourself; you get the first real sense of being a pilot. On the other hand, it wasn’t until I had actually strapped the jet on had I realized the level of the situation I was in, I never thought twice until then about how they were about to let me take a 5 million dollar jet up by myself……which is bad ass!!; but then I began to get a little nervous. As I was going through my normal engine start up and taxi I could not stop thinking about the fact that if I miss something….its on me…I have no IP in the back to catch my mistake. You better believe it took me twice as long to start the jet as it normally takes. Although there is more room for error because I am on my own, there is still that safety factor that if I mess up or something goes terribly wrong I always have that option to just give it back to the taxpayers and punch out…..Martin Baker M-16 ejection seat….our get out of jail free card; Hopefully I never have to use it.

Once I got the plane started and up to the hold short line (line you ‘hold short’ of before taking off) most of the nervousness had left and my natural tendency to say ‘I got this shit’ took over. “Pogo 25 number one, static, patterns, my seat is armed” (call sign, number waiting for take off, type of take off [rolling, static], what I will be doing, and my safety pin is out of my ejection seat). The controller comes back “ Number one, winds three one zero at one four, cleared for take off”……holy shit I am about to do this! “Pogo 25 cleared for take off,” I respond. I taxi out onto the runway, come to a stop, click my nose wheel steering off, power up to about 30 percent, holding the brakes, check my engine gauges “engine green and white good for flight….lets go have some fun!”, I release the brakes and push it to full power. The plane torques a little to the left due to the propeller….a little correction with some right rudder and we are rolling down smoothly. Still making the normal call outs even though there is no one in the back “Airspeed alive, good engine!,” “eighty knots, start to pitch back.” Once lifted off I still call “two climbing, good engine, gear clear…..” (Two instruments tell us that we are climbing, the engine is running good, and clear the gear with the guy in the back), “Gear up, flaps up, lights out, 130” (gear have fully retracted, flaps have been retracted, a little light in the handle goes out when the gear are up, and the airspeed.). After that I went around the patch (pattern) before I decided to attempt my first landing with no supervision. The cockpit was oddly quiet, minus the radio chatter. The patterns felt normal as usual except I put quite the buffer on my landings….if they didn’t look right, feel right, or smell right I went around. The controllers for our runways are notorious for the ground to air hook. If we screw something up in the pattern and they notice it, we can still fail our ride; pogo’s that is (initial solo’s). All in all though it was still my day….for that 40 min or so that aircraft was mine; I pondered what they would do to me if I would have departed the pattern for a little fun out in the area….just for a moment though. The flight went well besides the few go around’s; I was able to bring the plane back safely with no problems. Once on the ground I taxied back and shut down where I had many of my classmates waiting!

There is a tradition that after your solo you get dunked in the solo pool…..a cow watering hole looking thing. There is a stipulation though…..if you make it back to the flight room without being caught then the class has to buy you beer for successfully eluding them; I did not get back to the flight room.

With solo out of the way I now got to get into some of the better parts of flying….Aerobatics! The first block of aerobatics consist of maneuvers that require only one control surface; The Loop, Aileron Roll, and Split S. I thought flying at 200knots was cool….till the ride after my solo. Majority of the ride was spent going over the maneuvers…….sweet! basically just yanking and banking pulling 3-4 G’s and going inverted for an hour; Something I had been dreaming of doing since I was a kid. The loop – a maneuver that is pretty straight forward, 230-250 knots wings level and then a 3-4G pull…..straight to the zipper, then slowing to 120-140 over the top (have to keep an eye on this because if your faster than this over the top you will gain too much energy/airspeed on the way down….dangerous), a slight less pull over the top but right back in on the way down. On the way down pick up a road to pull straight while you pull to the horizon. Pretty cool maneuver. Other maneuvers include the aileron roll and the split S.

With the first solo complete I was now onto more important matters, Mid-phase checkride. Mid-phase checkride is the first checkride of four in phase II. The checkride itself is divided into two sections, the ground portion and the flight portion. You basically fly a profile that contains many different maneuvers and types of patterns/landings first and then come back for a ground evaluation that test your knowledge of the aircraft and emergency procedures. Everything on the flight and ground portion start off as an excellent and then move down in grade as you, in essence ‘screw up’. There is a whole flight of check pilots dedicated to the very task of evaluating students. They are allowed to fly with a student only once to insure that there is a no biased evaluation of the student’s performance. Check rides are some of the most stressful flights in UPT; in college your test were weighed more than your daily homework’s and participation grades….same thing here. There are a few small differences though…..college tests: controlled environment, check rides: several variables out of your control (i.e. weather, aircraft performance, difficulty of check pilot, etc.) and one dude watching your every move from the back seat.

They tell you that you need to be as prepared as you possibly can because Murphy is going to sitting right by your side. That was the truth for the day of my check ride. The night before my check ride the weather called for winds out of the south (runway 13R) with a possible change during the day coming from the north (runway 31L). So the night before I decided to be as prepared as possible and go over how the pattern would change if the runway changed; good on me right? A little. The day came and I had everything ready for the ground evaluation I just needed to get through the flight. Well as stated, Murphy decided to come for the ride. That morning the winds not only shifted to runway 31L but they also were calling for high gusty winds…..”F’ing great!” I thought to myself. This means I would have to carry power in on final and I would have to totally change the way I do my emergency landing pattern (a one chance try at the runway simulating an engine out, gusty winds make it very difficult). It is a very eerie feeling briefing with someone you have never flown with before that is going to have a huge affect on the rest of your life. So I meet my check pilot, 1Lt DeWolfe. First impressions were not bad, it was still the, I am the IP and you are the student feel but it was not as bad as I had expected it to be. So we briefed up the flight and stepped to the jet, where the first possible hook sometimes happens – the aircraft forms (forms that show any write ups/discrepancies/fuelings/engine hours…etc.). If studs miss anything on the forms and try and take a jet without the proper forms…instant hook. Murphy decided to say hello here too! The forms for my jet had a lot of stuff I had not seen before but in my mind it was no time to go asking the IP…”what does that write up mean?” Hind sight I should have asked a crew chief but luckily enough nothing was wrong with the forms when I put them back in the aircraft…..whew! We strapped the jet on and started listening to ATIS (weather/airfield status…etc.), sure enough winds gusting and something interesting, a cloud cover rolling in….hmmm. If the status is not dual (weather at a certain weather minimum) then normally the check rides don’t happen….normally. The weather was calling for restricted solo (another status that allows solos) when I pulled from the chocks but by the time I had gotten onto the taxi way the shit hit the fan. They quickly changed the status to restricted patterns (one of the lowest status’s, lower than dual) and now they were doing a different departure……a departure I had never done before. At this point I almost wanted to laugh because there was a list in my head that I made before I stepped that had everything that could possible go wrong..….one by one they were occurring. Because of the status change the taxi way got very congested because they were recalling all the solos that had taken off a few minutes before. All the available places I normally had to do my run up were taken…..”where the hell am I supposed to go!” I began thinking to myself. The IP was nice enough to take the aircraft and park off to the side out of the way….it was a non-standard event so I was not graded on it.

By the time we got to the run up area the status was not dual….so I queried the IP “Sir, right now the status is not calling for dual….are we still going to go?”…..after a long pause he just came back “just continue doing your run up I will take care of that.” So I am thinking there is no way we are going, we don’t have a dual status and the weather looks like crap. After I finish the run up he said the absolute opposite of what I wanted to hear “ok dude, here is what you are going to do, you are going to pattern delay here, I will get you to low key (mid-way portion of an ELP, didn’t have the weather for a full up ELP), and then we will hit the area and then come home.” Now this changed my whole profile; Hmmm….So I make a quick scan of my list, ‘yup, everything that I think could have gone wrong, has gone wrong’. My response to him of course is “Yes Sir!” I attribute everything in that flight to the moment right before I pulled onto the runway….I made a quick prayer, and then threw everything out the window, I had no more excuses for doing bad, I was in the worst state I could possibly be in. “You got this shit Mike!” The most amazing thing happened next, I flew one of the best, most precise flights I ever flew since I began flying the T-6. Everything in the flight just worked perfectly, I carried power in on final and my landings were money, I was conservative and rolled off of low key early and my ELP was perfect, and all my maneuvers in the area could not have been done better. The easiest part came when I got back, the ground evaluation. I over prepared for the ground evaluation so all the questions came and went; quick and easy. He briefed me on everything that happened during the flight and the ground evaluation and then told me my grade. It amazed me to hear the words come out of his mouth when he told me I had earned a 2E, a very good check ride score. Only two downgrades for the whole flight.

Whew!!! Now on to advanced aerobatics! I thank god for everyday I get to fly!