Friday, April 4, 2008

Day 1 – Wednesday – 2 April 08

Finally, after 4 years at the Academy, and 8 months of casual, UPT has begun! Even so, today was only an administrative day again. This morning at 0730 we reported to 41st heritage room/bar for our helmet fitting. This consisted of putting on a helmet (I’m a Large) and the face mask and getting those tightened and fitted just right. Then we plugged into a testing machine that checks for leaks by blasting air into your hopefully air-tight mask. It was nice because that was over by about 0930 and I was able to come back to my house and get a quick nap in this morning as well.

At 1230 my half of the class then reported to the clinic where we proceeded to hurry up and wait until almost 1400 when they finally began processing us. By the time I was finally done it was about 1700. I was seen by a doc, took a couple of vision exams (including that crazy and often difficult depth-perception one) , had my feet-prints recorded (Mom, please ignore…it’s so they can identify us in the case of a crash where often the only recognizable things that survive are boots with the foot still inside of them) , and I got to get my blood take AGAIN so they could test me for HIV AGAIN even though they just did it in January at Seymour. (let’s just say I’m not exactly losing any sleep or the results of that one).

The clinic also put us on 5 drugs to ground test before next Tuesday. We have to take 2 types of antibiotics and 3 types of sleep-inducing pills. This is so we know if we’ll have any bad reactions to any of the pills if we ever have to take them in the future and then fly a plane.
I was at least then able to get a good workout and run in before making it to the 1900 service at Lighthouse tonight. So, altogether a good start to the pilot-training experience. Tomorrow we start at 0830 in the classroom at the flying squadron.

NOTE: I will go back through here later and make some brief updates on pre-class-starting activities here at Columbus for those interested in the gap between leaving seymour and now.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"...had my feet-prints recorded (Mom, please ignore…it’s so they can identify us in the case of a crash where often the only recognizable things that survive are boots with the foot still inside of them)"

You know your Mom, Dan--I didn't ignore it!

I've enjoyed catching up on the technical details of your week and look forward to checkin' on in you each day! Love you & pray much for you! Mom