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.