So once again I am awake at 0500 on a Sunday morning. Not for any particular reason, it just seems that I cant seem to enjoy all the benefits that sleeping late has to offer. I guess that it is not that bad because it does give me a chance to update this thing from the last few weeks of activities.
The last time that you all heard from me, I was waiting to take my formation checkride and not that worried about it. Well I have since hooked my formation checkride (my score wasn't that bad) and passed my elimination check. We were the first ones in our class to check, and we were the first ones to fly in the kind of weather that we were having. They hooked me for a pretty vague reason (a hook none the less, but most people believed it wasn't the strongest reasoning it should have been). I went into a cloud after a maneuver by Lead and "did not act in an expeditious manner to ensure safety of the flight". Sounds really official and scary but in this case it means that I did exactly what I was supposed to. That is all in the past now, and hopefully it didn't have too much affect on what will happen in a week's time from now.......TRACK SELECT.
Track select is fast approaching and things are getting more exciting everyday. A few days after my elimination check I had my last to flights in the T-6. They were low levels and they were pretty sweet flights. They are pretty low threat, which means that there aren't really a lot of expectations from the IP. We basically just fly around at 500 feet for about half an hour and a very well prepared and very well used route in the local area. That is probably one of the more useful rides in pilot training for people who aspire to be C-130 pilots, because that is where a lot of time is spent in the Herc. I flew my last flight on Sunday the 22nd of February and it was a pretty neat feeling. The IP let me have a little fun after we flew the route. We went to an auxiliary field and shot some instrument approaches, and then we went back to the base and flew different types of patterns that I haven't got to fly in a while. Probably the most important part was getting to call "Texan complete" on my last radio call in a T-6. Not many people get to do that because of the way the system works, but because I landed when the tower was in control of the runway and not the RSU I got to call it. There is a good chance that I will be the only one in my class to do so. It was a pretty good landing if I have to say so myself.
Since that Sunday, I have been absolutely bored out of my mind. There is not much worse than being in pilot training with nothing to do. We have no idea what aircraft we are going on to next so we can't study, but we still have to be in the room for about half the day even though we cant fly. We do get some work done for track select (script, slide show, video) but there is only so much you can take. The worst part of it is that we are the senior class and we still have show times at 0500. We have been the only class in the history of pilot training (not a confirmed statement) to only show up after 7 o'clock twice in the entirety of phase II. We even have early show times for this next week, and we only have a total of seven student flights before everyone is T-6 complete. Enough on that. Track select should be a pretty cool day. We get to do lots of stuff that show the people who are important to us the kind of things we did everyday. They get to come in to the flight room and sit through a formal brief and stand up/ep. Then they get to tour all of the places that affect our daily lives (RSU, tower, RAPCON, etc). They also get to go into the simulators and see what it was like to fly the Texan II. The day concludes with the ceremony where they tell us what aircraft we are going to move on to. For some people it is not a nervous experience at all, but for others, there is a lot of hopes and dreams riding on what they get. I will be happy with anything, but I really really really want to go down to corpus.
In other news, it is snowing in Columbus. The average high for this last week was in the high sixties, and as i type this message we are currently getting a couple of inches of snow. Crazy. Here are some pictures since I haven't posted any in a while.
This is us out partying with the guys in Starkville
This is a picture (or several pictures) of our flight room. I found a program that makes panoramic shots out of picutres you have taken.
