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The road to my wings
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Name	Stephen
Date	17-11-2009
Location
Message	(Tuesday 2115) We had 18 degrees today! Thank God for global warming. Yet the wind were out of limits again - almost all day. Then suddenly, at about 1530, Ops goes on the PA system saying that the winds have calmed down somewhat and they're starting a flying programme. So I got put on the schedule for a formation flight. We did a wing take off which was pretty sporty. Tower called the wind as 7 knots right from the side, but it must have been at least 15. It was hard to control the plane on the roll but as we picked up speed and I got some more authorithy over the controls I got back into position and off we went. Then we got in the air, did the checks and a g-awareness check and we were ready to start "playing." I had expected a bad g-tolerance as I hadn't done anything which involves pulling g's in a veeery long time, but it was better than expected. We did fluid manoevring, where you get behind lead at a distance of approx. 750 feet and follow him around. My lead today was a trained fighter pilot and he had warned me that he was going to do anything to try and shake me off and get behind me. So we started off and he was really going for it in a hardcore manner. During fluid manouvring, lead is limited to 4g and you're limited to 5g. However, once you start turning you don't even notice the g's. So my instructor in the back was grunting and breathing heavily and would often say "Ok GEA, that's over 6g's" while I'm throwing the plane around to stay behind lead. I could taste blood. My fangs were out and I wanted the kill...badly! I wasn't going to let him get behind me so I pushed hard until my instructor called "terminate." I think he'd had enough g's at that point. One thing is when you're flying and you're focused on the task, but another thing is when you're sitting as a passenger and just sucking up all the g's. It's very different indeed! Yesterday evening I took my little boy for a hockey game here at the base arena. He had fun watching them skate on the ice and it was a new experience for him too, so I enjoyed it with him. I think there's another game tomorrow night so we might head there again as it'll be one of the last things we do together before I leave on the cross country this Friday. The plan is that we have the day off on Thursday so that we don't end up working 10 days in a row or so. Then we plan to be back home next Wednesday. It's going to be fun! /GEA

Name	Stephen
Date	16-11-2009
Location
Message	(Monday 1210) Another week on and the winds are out of limit today so nobody's flying. Friday night I went to the mess and ended up playing crud with a bunch of instructors. Quite spontaneous actually. I walked into the room and a couple of them went "GEA, wanna play?" You don't say no to a game of crud on a Friday night... It was the biggest game I've ever participated in. We must have been a dozen of players on each team. It was great fun but our team got trashed. Then Saturday night we were invited at a Candian mate for "Surf and Turf" which is the term used for Lobster and Steak. Awesome food and then we ended up playing FIFA10 and Rockband on his playstation. Yesterday was a rather standard Sunday. Took my little boy to the local "airplane and train" museum, as he calls it and did some shopping. Today we started doing some more in depth planning of our cross country. It's really important that the weather cooperates with us or else the plan will be ruined. That's it for now. /GEA

Name	Stephen
Date	13-11-2009
Location
Message	(Friday 1355) I finally got in the air today. It's been almost two weeks since my last flight so I was actually entitled to a free review flight, which would have been a repetition of the last flight but I pressed on to skip it and go directly to the next flight, which was NAV11, the last low level navigation mission on the Harvard II for me. The flight itself was a bag of crap. I was so behind the aircraft all of the time. I was struggling with the basics. Anyway, as the flight progressed I got better and managed to hit the target right on the second even thought the IP gave me a diversion enroute which gave me about one minute time error. So I did the calculations and the necessary correction and it worked. Then we flew back and he let me practise some overhead breaks and landings. Now I see why it's a good idea with a review flight after such a long layoff. Anyway, it was the first flight on 2B where I didn't get a snake. I got an Acheived, but I don't really care at this point. It was more important to get another X in the book and be a step closer to finishing on the T6 than getting a snake. Tonight's mess night and then it's time for the weekend. Have a good one! /GEA

Name	Stephen
Date	12-11-2009
Location
Message	(Thursday 2215) My instructor was grounded today so I didn't get my flight. Hopefully they'll give me one tomorrow or else I'll start murdering people or something. I asked if I could get NAV11 done so that I'm done with the NAV phase. NAV11, being the last flight of a phase is kind of a test, but not quite. They call it a confirmation ride. You do the trip either with a snapper or with a senior flight instructor. No big deal. Right now I just want to get it done so that I can hopefully finish Phase 2B by Christmas and then start forgetting everything about the T6 and start concentrating about the Hawk. Apparently they finally decided that next week, probably Thursday or Friday, we'll be going on our cross-country. So tomorrow I'll use a couple of hours on making a draft of where I want to go. Then I'll just present my plan to the Ops Officer and see what he says. Hopefully he'll approve but it also requires that the other guys also want to go to those places. The biggest problem at this time of the year is obviously the weather. I would give anything to do some low level navigation in the Rockies and then make some of those insane IFR approaches to those small airstrips between the mountains. We'll probably ending up going South, over the border to Las Vegas or California, where the sun is always shining. Let's just wait and see where we end up. /GEA

Name	Stephen
Date	11-11-2009
Location
Message	(Wednesday 1755) I finally gave in for the Facebook temptation. I'd gotten tired of the usual "why are you not on Facebook?" question which comes several times a day, every day. Today was a public holiday here in Canada. Rememberance day is when you remember fallen soldiers in past and present wars. The Canadians make quite a big deal out of it, which is good. Where would we be today if they hadn't fought for our freedom in, say WWII? I'm on tomorrow's schedule for the first CH flight of 2B. I haven't flown CH for months now so it's going to be interesting (and fun) to do some aerobatics again. Yet this time it'll be more advanced aerobatics including vertical manoeuvrs. I'll let you know how it went...if the weather allows me to go, that is. /GEA

Name	Stephen
Date	09-11-2009
Location
Message	(Monday 0910) I went to the doc and got ungrounded this morning. I'm not on the sched but that's ok as I often feel like a zombie on Monday mornings. And having felt like a bag of shit for so long now I'll need a few hours to start getting back in the system again. The rumour is that we'll leave on our cross country some time late this week if all is as it should be. That will probably be on Thursday. But this morning one of the instructors who was supposed to come on the trip got grounded, so it also requires that he gets ungrounded before it's time to go. That's that for now. I'll let you know about new happenings as they happen. /GEA

Name	Stephen
Date	05-11-2009
Location
Message	(Thursday 1900) The weather has been great all week, yet I only got that one nav mission last Monday. I got grounded after taking the flu shots and I'm still grounded. The doc did mention that some people get sick from getting the shot and I sure did. Otherwise not much new here. We had night flying yesterday and today and I was supposed to do my 2B night flight but being grounded doesn't help much. According to the weather forecats it's supposed to be +15C. I don't quite believe it until it happens, but this place does keep surprising me over and over. /GEA

Name	Stephen
Date	02-11-2009
Location
Message	(Monday 1650) The weather finally cleared and I got NAV10 done this morning. It was really beautiful weather but unfortunately the birds had the same thought in their head. So we had to step up our height to 1000 feet instead of the usual 500 feet due to the large amount of migratory birds. The flight itself was good fun. I enjoyed every second of it, even doing the freakin walk around before the flight. I'm really going to miss flying the T6 - it's such an awesome plane. On the other hand, moving on to the jet won't be that terrible either... The instructor gave me a few extra tasks to keep me busy. The first one was that there was AAA (Anti Aircraft Artillery) 5 miles around the first turn point. So I circumnavigated to get directly on the next leg while staying on time and it worked out well. Then he gave me a "target of opportunity" along the route, but I could only hit it on a certain time so first I had to find it on the map and then do the calculations and I figured out that I had to slow down considerably in order to lose the extra 65 seconds that I had. I did that and got over the new target within a couple of seconds. From then on I continued to the original target and got it within five seconds. All good fun and keeps you busy. I used my glasses in the plane for the first time. At first all was good, and slightly sharper than usual but after a while I started seeing worse and worse until I realized that they were fogging up on me. So I ripped them off my face and continued the good old fashioned way. It worked just as good. Tonight I'll do some more work on the T6 drawing and then hopefully I'll start cutting some wood sometime soon. It was my turn to take the H1N1 (Swine flu) vaccine today so I'm grounded for the next 36 hours. Typical, now that the weather finally cleared! /GEA

Name	Stephen
Date	01-11-2009
Location
Message	(Sunday 1215) As you've probably guessed I didn't go up last Friday. So there's not much happening for me at the moment. When I get in periods like these I tend to start "new projects" and that's exactly what I did this time too. A Canadian mate of mine from Bandit flight and myself are planning to build a Harvard II RC model, which is the only right thing to do when you fly the real one and fly RC models. It's a long term project which will stretch over most of the winter, the reason being that there are no kits available of this aircraft - not even plans or drawings! The other reason for chosing to do it this way is that we're both short of cash so we'll have to buy the stuff over a long term. So first we did some research and got some drawings from the mechanics down at the flight line and this weekend I started drawing them to scale. The plane is going to be 1:10 scale, which makes it just over 1m in both lenght and span. Tomorrow morning I'm on the sched for NAV10. The weather was really nice yesterday and looks ok today apart from the windy conditions. The forecast does look promising for the coming week but you have to take everything with a grain of salt with regards to weather in this region, especially at this time of the year. Yesterday night was Halloween. I took my little boy for trick or treat in the neighbourhood and now he has enough candy for the rest of his childhood. I'll do my best to protect his teeth and eat the candy myself... /GEA

Name	Stephen
Date	29-10-2009
Location
Message	(Thursday 0955) I guess it's about time to write something in here. It's been a terrible week with very bad weather. Low clouds with icing, precipitation and bad visibility have meant that practically no-one's been in the air. Our Hawk course has once again got delayed, this time to February. We're going to end up being here forever. I'm on the schedule for a formation flight with Hamster on my wing today, but that requires the weather to clear up somewhat. This month in general has been really terrible. I got 4 flights and 3 sims done, which is alot more than most of the other guys have done. November is normally a bad weather month and December is statistically the worst one of them all. Then when you take Christmas holidays etc. into account, it only makes things worse. Enough complaining for now... /GEA

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