The road to my wings
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| Date | 03-06-2010 |
| Location |  |
| Message | (Thursday 1200) I did my flight to Swift Current airport yesterday and it went ok. Learned a few new things, had a few problems with the radio not working properly coming back and got another X in the book. This morning I had another IF sim going from Cold Lake to Edmonton and back. All went well and the next sim should be from Edmonton to Calgary and back and then I'll be set up for a min cross country. The cross country normally takes you to Calgary, Edmonton or Winnipeg but if there's no instructor available who's willing to stay there overnight, then you end up going to the usual places, that is Swift Current, Saskatoon or even Regina. The weather's pretty crappy today so there's not much flying going on. In the sim, at least, the weather is always exactly the way you want it to be. /GEA |
| Date | 01-06-2010 |
| Location | |
| Message | (Tuesday 1740) I must admit that 2010 has been a pretty crappy year so far but at least today I got a break. It feels great to know that nobody in the school's history has done better than me on the Hawk CH phase. There may be a few who did just as good, but nobody can have better than a perfect score. The sim went well this afternoon too. Now I just have to turn that big CH/IF switch in my brain to IF and solely concentrate on that. If all goes well and with that I mean good weather too, then I could do my IF final test in a week or so. When you pass the IF phase on the Hawk you get your IFR ticket also known as IFR rating, meaning that you're certified to fly IFR as pilot in command. After the sim I went downtown and got my car sold,with mixed feelings of course. It's awesome that after having a sports car like that for two years you sell it and break even! The reason being that when I bought it in the USA, the US Dollar was worth 5.1 Danish kroners, and now the Canadian Dollar is worth almost 6 Danish kroners...and still on the way up! So now I'll just put the money on my Canadian account and when the Canadian Dollar looks like it's topping, I'll transfer them to my Danish account. That's it for now. Tonight I feel like watching a well deserved movie. Tomorrow I have a trip to Swift Current airport. Should be fun. /GEA |
| Date | 01-06-2010 |
| Location | |
| Message | (Tuesday 0955) I finally got the CH test done. All went really well and the weather conditions were pretty good for a test too. Good visibility, light winds with only a low crosswind component and almost no clouds. I did my thing and the snapper was pretty happy with all the work. So I got my "Snake" which means that I've snaked the whole CH phase, including the test! I'm happy indeed to have done so well on it. My snapper was the British ex-Jaguar pilot and he was pretty good to fly with. Nice and easy going and having a snapper like that allows you to relax and just do your stuff without too many interruptions. That's that for now. JOR and RIS have flown their solo checks and both passed so I'll go and cheer them and take a few pictures when they land at around 1115 or so. Then this afternoon I have an IF sim, where I'll be flying to Swift Current airport and back. /GEA |
| Date | 31-05-2010 |
| Location | |
| Message | (Monday 1905) I didn't get the test done due to yet another day with bad weather. I'm scheduled for tomorrow morning and by the looks of it, we should have good weather tomorrow. However, I don'tknow how I'm going to stay awake for that flight. Briefing is at 0615 so it's going to be one of those really early flights. I just hope that I'll get some good sleep tonight as I tend to sleep bad the night before tests due to excitement, nerves and my brain spinning and trying to figure out what the entry speed to a particular manoeuver was. Now I'm going to do a bit of studying and then hit the sheets early. /GEA |
| Date | 30-05-2010 |
| Location | |
| Message | (Sunday 1755) Another week over. I had a practise sim this morning followed by my CH pre-test which went pretty good. I was scheduled with a German F4 driver and since there were no Harvards flying today, one of the Hawk guys decided to fly in the Harvard areas. So we had a pretty rough idea where to look for him while transiting out through the Harvard areas but in order to make things interesting, the IP told me that whoever spots that other Hawk first, will get a free Coke from the other guy. Fair enough, I thought. But as time went by, I didn't think it was fair enough anyway. So I took off and during climb out I was busy dodging clouds (there were alot of them!), flying the plane, doing my checks, and at the same time trying to spot that Hawk while looking out for other aircraft of course. All that the IP had to do, of course, was just to look out for that Hawk. So as we got closer to his area I said: "There he is! Three o'clock, slightly above the horizon, on the left of those Cirrus clouds." The IP looked carefully but simply couldn't spot him. Then he said: "I have a very good eye sight so yours must be pretty amazing because I just can't spot him. I'm getting old,I guess." What he didn't know was that I was bullshitting him... Not half a minute later he goes: "Oh yes, now I see him, right there where you mentioned." Now I thought that he was screwing with me but he wasn't and I picked up the other aircraft too, luckily for me exaclty where I told him that I had "seen" it. Then we got back home and debriefed and he said: "Well, I owe you a Coke then." I confessed and told him that I had been bullshitting him all along the way. We had a laugh and he decided that I didn't deserve the Coke anyway... Tomorrow I'm scheduled for the CH test and then for an IF sim. Let's see if the weather's gonna cooperate. /GEA |
| Date | 29-05-2010 |
| Location | |
| Message | (Saturday 1600) The weather stayed bad yesterday but in the afternoon they moved to an IFR programme so I was quickly scheduled to fly my trip to Yorkton and back, which I had done the previous day in the sim. We had a low cloud base so it was perfect weather for an IF trip, where you actually flew in clouds practically all of the time. Then after the trip there wasn't much time before I had to go for the beer call. Beer call is a tradition from the fighter community and it was lots of fun indeed. One of the German IP's took the role of "the Mayor" meaning that he would run the show and that he would decide everything. First we had to decide which language was going to be the official language for the party and the only British IP in the school quickly said "English, because we won!" The Germans couldn't really argue with that and neither could the French Canadians or any of the rest of us. He's flown Jaguars and Hawks in the RAF among other aircraft and now he instructs here in Moose Jaw. The beer call, by the way, was strictly for fast jet pilots. No Harvard pilot or guests such as girlfriends or wives were allowed. After the beer call, where we ran out of booze fairly quickly due to all the penalty shots that most of us endured during the "Instant justice" part of the evening, we moved on to the mess, where most of us stayed there until midnight or so, at which point, any surviving soles moved to the Dane bar and returned home at 0400 or so. It was a rough night and I wasn't capable of much today. Tomorrow I'm once again scheduled for my CH pre-test but the weather has to clear up somewhat if the flight has to happen. We'll just have to wait and see. /GEA |
| Date | 27-05-2010 |
| Location | |
| Message | (Thursday 2020) Time is really flying now and another month is almost over. The weather was, as predicted, terrible and deteriorated as the day progressed. Fortunately it was good enough for my IF sim, so at least I got a mission done and another X in the book none the less. I'm almost half way done with the Hawk course already and as much as I'm enjoying it, it's painful to know that this'll be the last fast jet that I'll get to fly. Tomorrow I'm scheduled for IF5, where I'll fly to Yorkton, which is about 100 miles away from here, so the trip itself shouldn't take more than ten minutes or so but I'll have to practise a few holding patterns and an instrument approach there and then probably do the same back at Moose Jaw before we complete the flight. The weather is supposed to be crap but that's no problem for an IF trip where you want to fly off the instruments anyway. Later on I'm once again scheduled for the CH pre-test but once again, I'm pretty sure that I'll get cancelled. After work we have a Dragon flight beer call where the students and instructors get together and sort of welcome the new guys into Dragon flight. We also have to tell funny stories about eachother using the 10% rule. The rule simply means that as long as 10% of what you say is true, you're good to go. Then you bullshit the rest or just exaggerate. Quite a few of us have done stupid things lately, myself being no exception, so it should be entertaining... /GEA |
| Date | 26-05-2010 |
| Location | |
| Message | (Wednesday 2230) I finally got my last CH solo done this afternoon. It was rather productive and I had ample time to practise all the sequences a few times before returning to base for some pattern work. It was probably the flight where I had least fuel left by the time I landed. Normally I transit out to the Hawk area by flying on a certain radial between the Harvard areas but today the Radio beacons (TACAN and VOR) at Moose Jaw were unservicable, so I decided to fly both out and back below the Harvard areas. At low level you burn more fuel, and doing it at over 400kt doesn't make it any more efficient. However I only feel comfortable at low level if I'm going fast, the reason being that if you hit a bird or have any kind of other engine issues, the high speed allows you to get a good zoom and convert that high kinetic energy into potential energy, or in plain English, convert speed into altitude, which in the end, will buy you time, perhaps enough to solve the problem or to make a safe ejection if it becomes necessary. Tomorrow I'm on the schedule for the pre-test and then Friday for the test, but by the looks of it, today's gonna be the only day with good weather this week, which is really bad. I had a good continuity in the CH phase but it really got ruined this last week or so due to all the bad weather we had. It annoys me that I don't go up to the test with a good continuity but that's the way it goes, I guess. Now I'm off to bed. Good night. /GEA |
| Date | 25-05-2010 |
| Location | |
| Message | (Tuesday 0835) We had a nice long weekend as yesterday was Queen Victoria day. Today I was scheduled for my last CH solo for the first wave meaning I had to be in for the first met brief at 0615. The weather, however, had other plans. It's raining heavily and winds are gusting over 45kt. It's actually expected to deteriorate during the day but should be good flying weather tomorrow. So I didn't waste any time this morning. I dug into the Hawk AOI (Aircraft operating instructions) which is basically the pilot manual, which I hgand't looked at for a week or so. It's quite a handful. Lots of reading and very dry indeed. I had been approaching the back cover for a while and now I finished it again, which means that tomorrow I'll start reading it all over again. That's the thing with complicated AOI's. Once you get to the end you start forgetting things from the early chapters. Also, every time you read it you discover new things that you didn't notice the other times. On bad (read "terrible") weather days like today we typically have bad weather briefs. A bad weather brief is basically when a student briefs the rest of the flight students and IP's about something relevant to our job for 10 minutes or so. Most people make a power point presentation. Today we'll be having two of these briefs which means that my turn is approaching fast, so I better get mine done. I plan on briefing on aircraft recognition when the time comes... /GEA |
| Date | 21-05-2010 |
| Location | |
| Message | (Friday 1815) Yesterday I was supposed to fly my solo trip but shortly before I stepped, the winds went out of solo limits so I didn't get any flights done. Last night I had a very hard time falling asleep. I kept waking up performing Immelmans, Pitch-backs and Slices in my sleep. Annoying as hell since I looked like a zombie all day today, with my eyes hanging. Today I was on the schedule for CM1, which stands for Composite 1. A composite is basically a free ride, not graded but still counts as an X, meaning it's part of the course syllabus. You normally use it before a test to practise or upgrade some of the sequences. The only thing about composites is that you have to do sequences from two different phases. With that I mean that you cannot use the whole flight for CH sequences, for instance. Since I've only flown CH and IF on the Hawk so far, I had to practise something from both. So I flew out to the area and practised all my advanced aerobatics and then flew back home to do a High TACAN instrument approach and flew around the radar square for an ILS approach. Then we had planned on flying traffic patterns visually but as we started, the wind went out of the airframe limits, meaning that the crosswind component was over 25kt. So we ended the flight and called it a day. The wind stayed out of limits the rest of the day so we didn't get more done. This coming Monday is a public holiday so it's going to be a well deserved nice long weekend...except for the practise sim that I booked for Sunday morning. Some go to church, others do a practise box. I suppose it all depends on what religion you belong to. /GEA |
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