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.
Academics complete!
August 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment
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.
I Solo’ed Today
June 18, 2008 By 2 Comments
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.
Aerospace Physiology Complete …
April 16, 2008 By 1 Comment
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.
IFS
November 23, 2007 By Leave a Comment
So I am and have been up in Pueblo, CO now for some time. It’s been pretty busy, certainly not what I was expecting. We are usually up around 0430 and have a Formal Brief at 0530. First Go of the day is around 0700 when it get’s light out. Formal brief consists of the students going over the weather, and any other pertinent information regarding that day’s flying. We then have an EP Briefing and then a Stand-Up EP. Stand-Ups are when there is a scenario presented and a random student is chosen to stand up at the front of the room and work through how to deal with that particular emergency. They tend to be a little stressful but prove to be a great learning tool.
I’ve completed two flights now; my dollar ride and my C201 ride. The dollar ride is nothing more than going up and getting use to the DA-20. I got 4 landings in and we accomplished a few slips. On my 201 ride we went over Steep Turns, Slow Flight and Power-Off stalls. All in all they’ve been going well so far.
Days are pretty long. We typically go from 0430 to 1630 or 1700 and then spend the next couple of hours chair flying or studying. Chair flying is where you use a poster or the cockpit simulator and run through your entire flight for the next day. Everything from checklists, to what departures, radio calls, etc.
The instructors all seem to be very helpful, but of course everyone has their own way of doing things.The food has been pretty good. We aren’t getting paid per diem, so we pretty much have to eat in the Dining Facility or pay for food out of pocket (Which isn’t happening for me). The food is alright, not the greatest, but then again they are serving 60+ people each meal. Honestly it’s better than what I was expecting. Typical meals include a specialty meat for the night, veggies, and various sides. They have a grill where you can get Burgers, Cheeseburgers, Chicken Nuggets, Grilled Cheese, Fries, Onion Rings, etc every night. They have a nice wide variety of drinks and then a salad bar as well. They also have a sandwich station. All good, it just get’s pretty repetitive.All in all, not too bad. Just a shame the wouldn’t let us come up accompanied.
October! Already?
October 28, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Yes, it has been a while, but I thought I would take a few moments to give a recap on what’s going on here at Altus. I’ve been working a lot of a ton of different projects, everything from a Database in MS Access to a huge Poster Display Board to represent the Town of Altus and the Air Force base during symposiums and conferences. I’ve almost completed all of my training for becoming a DZCO (Drop Zone Control Officer) and I’ll have that completed hopefully next week when I take a flight and watch a cargo drop out of a C-17.
Mom is currently out here with us and we just got done two pretty busy weekends. We went down to Sheppherd Air Force Base in Texas for an Open House/Airshow and got to see a lot of cool planes there (B-2, F-22, CV-22, C-5, to name a few). Needless to say I’m getting pretty anxious to get to Pilot Training and start down the flying path.
I’m heading to Pueblo, CO in a week to start IFS so I’m getting pretty excited about that too. There should be some new pictures uploaded here soon of Palo Duro Canyon in or outside of Amarillo, TX, so keep an eye out for them.
Enjoying the Altus Life
September 3, 2007 By 2 Comments
Well I know that it’s been a while since I’ve made any posts up on the blog, so I figured I would recap what’s been going on the past few weeks.
We stayed in a TLF (Transient Lodging Facility) for the first 3-4 days until we were able to get a house picked out on base. Base housing here at Altus has been privatized which means that a contractor is now managing the on-base housing and no longer the military. We basically walked into the office, told them we wanted to pick out a house, they took us for a tour in 4 or 5 that were available, we picked one, went through the contract and that was that.
We setup a time for the movers to move everything into our house and then scheduled a time to get the cable hooked up and we were good to go. We probably spent the last 3 weeks getting everything unpacked and situated just how we wanted it. Frances spearheaded that project and she had made our house very “homey”.
I started settling into my new job where I’m working in Stan/Eval. Stan/Eval pretty much takes care of getting pilots and booms checked out on different qualifications and ensuring all documentation reflects that. My specific tasks lie more on the administrative end. I’ve been entering in data that check pilots give us on how students did, format everything correctly and ensure they are sent out to the specific units each student has come from. I’ve also been tasked with a lot of the technological short-comings of the Stan/Eval section and have been re-working Excel spreadsheets, and converting the ones that make sense into Access Databases.
We went to a rodeo 2 weeks ago and that was quite the experience. Neither of us had actually been to a rodeo, but we are both glad we went. We can understand where the events originated from, but why someone would want to jump off a horse, and wrestle a calf to the ground and tie them up today is beyond us.
We also decided that the Full size bed and mattress just weren’t cutting it anymore. We had been sleeping in a queen size since we moved out of our house in Stillwater and it was really nice to not be cramped; especially at the foot of the bed. Sooo, we started looking on Craigslist and found a king size mattress set made by Lady Americana in Oklahoma City one eventing and just jumped in the Pathfinder with the trailer attached and we went and picked it up. The trailer really has come in handy already.
Today we just got out and went to Quartz Mountain and went rock climbing (or boulder climbing). Whatever it was, it most certainly wasn’t hiking. We had packed some snacks, lunch, water, and the camera and that stuff just got in the way when we were out on the face of this mound of rocks. It was a lot of fun though. Both Frances and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. You’ll have to check out the photos section as we’ve uploaded a good number of pictures there.
Bye Bye Maxwell
August 14, 2007 By 3 Comments
Well, we finally broke free of Maxwell. I graduated this past Friday and we hit the road. We stopped in Little Rock, AR and stayed the night and then got up and drove into Stillwater. There Richard helped me install the D-Rings and wheel chocks for my bike which was an entire Sunday afternoon project but we now have a hauling machine. We loaded up the trailer and the poor Pathfinder was screaming to pull all 3500-4000 pounds. I see a Titan in the near future. Anyways, we loaded up and I arrived down here at Altus AFB. I’ll give some more details of our first two days later on here.
Wargames and the such
July 19, 2007 By 2 Comments
We finished our first war game simulation which was an entire day operation. It was pretty cool. We separated our team into 5 different sections. We had an AOC (Air Operations Center), and 5 WOC’s (Wing Operation Centers). I was the Deputy AOC director and was tasked with providing an attack strategy, and creating an ATO (Air Tasking Order). We then sent out the ATO and the WOC’s carried out the orders. It was pretty cool. We ended up deploying approximately 30 AAR (Air-to-Air Refuelers), 2 C2 (Command and Control) Aircraft, 2 ISR (Intel, Surveillance, Recon) aircraft, and over 120 Fighters/Bombers consisting of F-16CG’s, F-16CJ’s, F-15C’s, F-15E’s, B-1B’s, and HH-60′s. Our operation consisted in a major coalition victory against our intended target which will go unnamed to protect OPSEC (Operation Security).
We have another war game tomorrow in addition to ICARUS which is essentially an air power sport which is a glorified dodge-ball that really allows us to conceptualize OCA (Offensive Counterair) and DCA (Defensive Counterair) in addition to core competencies, distinctive capabilities and the such that I won’t bore anyone with.
We’ve also compiled the notes for our first test on Monday and it only consisted of 20-25 pages of pure doctrine and principles. Shouldn’t be too bad.
Go Russell, it’s your Birthday!
July 17, 2007 By 1 Comment
Well, it is indeed my birthday today, and I’m proud to say that I received phone calls with messages from Chris Battin, Grandma F, my parents, Aunt Debbie and Richard all in that order. I did however receive an email from Aunt Tammy before the whole bunch and an email from Aunt Kathy, so I think I did pretty well. Thank you all.
ASBC has been going well. It has been information overload. We’ve got about 20 lessons covered now that we are required to know information from for the first test which is coming up on this upcoming Monday. The layout of the course could certainly have been thought out a little better. They tend to throw information at us without fulling explaining what the information is for and place lessons sometimes in an order which could have been improved on, but what do ya do?
We’ve got our first warrior run (3 mile) tomorrow morning followed by a Motivational Speaker, Dan Clark, and then a class or two. All in all it won’t be a bad day tomorrow, I’m just anxious to get the first test behind me.
On to a completely different note, we are planning on going to pick up our enclosed 6×12 Dual Axle, V-Nose, Rear Ramp Door, Etrack installed, roof vented, ceiling light with switch trailer this weekend. We are still a little nervous about spending the money on it, but it appears that by throwing some stuff in it and having the Air Force move us will more than pay for it, so we probably won’t chicken out at this point.