We started our cross country earlier this morning and made a stop in Amarillo, TX for lunch then made our way up to Denver where I am right now watching a Colorado Rockies game. The game plan to tomorrow is to fly over the Rockies into another little airport before flying our night leg into Albuquerque.

Thursday was a fun day for me.  It marked a significant event in my UPT career.  It was more than likely the last solo that I’ll ever having the Air Force.  I got to fly solo against my IP who also flew solo and trusted me to be 10′ off his wingtip the whole time.  We both had a lot of fun.  I was the first student he solo’ed out.  That is I was the first student he approved and flew against solo in formation.  Now if I track T-1′s I won’t ever fly an aircraft solo again.

I just knocked out the last academic test we’ll have in the T-6. It’s a happy day. So now we just have 2 checkrides left and about 20 flights until I get to move on to the T-1.

Well, today I got to solo meaning I took the mighty T-6A Texan II up and burnt some holes in the pattern over Del Rio, TX.  Frances got to come out and watch and took some pretty good pictures that you can look at by clicking here.

The OSS commander here, a Lt Col was the one who flew my ride with me in the morning and he was also the person who “solo’ed” me out.  That basically means he flew a ride with me in the morning and approved me to go solo.  There are a couple things that made this pretty cool in my book.  For starters, when we are flying we have a call sign and when we solo we take the number from our IP’s call sign and use that for our number and we replace the word with “Pogo”.  The OSS commanders call sign is “Rattler 01″.  So when he solo’ed me out, I got to use the call sign “Pogo 01″.  Now this may not sound too significant, but it was pretty cool in my books, reason being that “01″ is the number designator that is used for Commanders.  So, in essence we were joking around that I was the “Pogo Commander.”

After soloing, the tradition is then to get dunked in a pool which you’ll see in the pictures.  There is a little more to it as well.  If you put up a fight, run, or struggle any when the rest of the flight goes to dunk you, they dunk you with patches and boots still on.  If you give up easily, they allow you to remove those items.  The other tradition is that if you make it back into the flight room without being noticed or intercepted, everyone in the flight owes you a drink of your choice.

Well, it just so happens that I made it back to the flight room unnoticed.  Go me.  Now the bad part is they decided to dunk me anyway (which follows with tradition) but they also decided that since I was a little sneaky that they wouldn’t let me take the boots off or the patches.  So now I have soaking wet boots and patches, and one awesome sense of accomplishment.  It’s now off to getting ready for my first checkride, the Mid-Phase contact checkride.

Frances and I got all settled into Del Rio.  We picked up a pretty nice, yet small house on Laughlin, and are starting to enjoy it more here than when we first arrived.

I just finished up a week at Aerospace Physiology, scored a 96% on two tests and completed my FACT test (Physical Strength and Endurance Test).  It’s been a relatively stressless week and from what I understand now is where the fun starts.  We being learning about the Systems of the aircraft tomorrow (Hydraulics from what I understand, so we’ll see how that goes.)

Frances got to Taxi in the T-6 as part of the Spouse Taxi program and we’ll get some pictures up soon from that.