Check ride and solo #2

All right, so my check ride went really well, praise the Lord! But first, that morning I had to attend the formation that I had stupidly volunteered for. Officership 101: never ever volunteer for anything! Which, trust me, I'd learned at the academy but was a situation where it was going to reflect poorly on our class if no one volunteered so me and 2 other guys saved the day. We had to show up at 0730 for the change of command ceremony for our new wing commander. Of course, they didn't actually need any of us to be there until 0845!! So we stood around in the already-hot sun for over an hour and a half before even doing anything! Then they formed us up and we stood at attention and parade rest as bodies in a formation for over 45 minutes and through 2 different speeches. It was so hot that we were all just soaked with sweat by the time it was all over. Everybody else in the flight didn't even have to show up to the flight room until 0940, so they all got to sleep in! After the formation I went home and took a shower, and since I wasn't going to make the formal brief I just stayed home and studied for an hour or so before even going to the flight room. Once there I got my card prepared and then continued to study for the check ride.

Tuesday night Ryan Keith and I all took turns chairflying with one of the others playing the role of ATC, and critic/monitor. I also did a complete pubs check to make sure everything was current in the hundreds and hundreds of pages of pubs we are all issued...fun! Then I reported for the ride and we briefed the mission up, which was pretty tame. Our jet was on the second sortie of the day, so it was a little hot but I thought we might be able to get it to start without motoring or external power. So we strapped in in the mid-day heat and shut the canopy. As luck would have it, one the five lousy hooks on the canopy refused to catch and I had to try over and over again with opening and closing the canopy a good 4 or 5 times before it would finally latch. Then, sure enough, we had a hot-start and shut the engine down; which means we then had to open the canopy again and request an external power cart. It took them almost 10 minutes to finally get the cart to us (and we're STILL sweating away) and then another couple minutes of running through the motoring procedure to cool down the engine. So, finally, I closed the canopy again, and sure enough, had to fiddle with that same latch again. By this time I could hardly see through my stinging eyes, and I was litterally dripping sweat onto my visor! We did get a good start that time and cranked up the ac. The rest of the ride went really well with nothing standing out, which was a good thing!

I actually got all my pattern work done on the first attempts, and then landed the plane. During our taxi back to park he took the aircraft and started throughing general questions at me! By that point my mind was so dead I couldn't even think straight and wasn't expecting anything at that point, so it took me a while to get my brain to spool back up to normal power. Finally we parked and then started the debrief inside. I actually only had to go through 1 EP and only a little bit more of general knowledge questioning. He then told me that he thought I'd had a really good ride and that I'm well on my way to a solid final-contact checkride as well (which may be as early as the middle of next week if the weather holds!!!). I ended up with a 5G, which is a really good score, although puts me in the middle of the pack in our flight as almost every one has performed really well. Right now we've got every one done with their checks and we had a final score of 10 passes and only 2 failures! Our sister flight is currently 50/50 and only 3/4 of the way through all of there checks, so we definitely had a strong showing!

After all of that, today I also had a weather test which is another of the 'most-failed' tests. Luckily with a bit of 'test taking skill' I only missed 3 again (seems to be my magic number) for a little under a 95%. This morning I flew with an IP for my first ride of this new block introducing all the advanced aerobatics, which are a lot of fun! They are quite draining, however, as the require a lot of focus and you pull a good number of Gs! I pulled over 5Gs on a number of occasions and almost 6Gs max at one point so I'm just wiped out! Anyways, that first flight went really well, and he told me that there was a huge difference for the better from my pre-check ride 2 days before. In fact, it was so solid that he gave me an 'excellent' overall grade, my first excellent overall for an actual flight (not sim)!! Then, I turned right around into my area solo for the 2nd go. I had passed all the new manuevers with a fair or better so I was allowed to go out and practice all of them on my own to my heart's content. I had a blast out there, with only 1 or 2 little scares...(the 6G pull having a little bit to do with a runaway dive coming out of one of the manuevers...) I then came back into the pattern about 55 minutes into the sortie and got a total of 4 landings in as well to finish it all off.

I had to go around on one of my attempted landings as a sudden crosswind and balloon scared me and I called it off. On the climb out the airspeed came up fast since I hadn't landed and was quite task-saturated. But I did remember the gear, though in that situation it was close!! My IP was actually in the RSU at the time, and it scared him enough that he made the same 'departure leg check gear flight' that I heard when I actually did overspeed the gear last time! Talk about an awful flash-back! So he was definately giving me a hard time earlier this afternoon for 'almost' doing the same thing again! But honestly, I had it under control this time, I totally did not forget the gear like last time, just waited to make sure I was clear of the ground first! :) But it was a really fun flight.

Tomorrow I'm scheduled to fly with an IP followed by another area solo just like today again; weather permitting of course. If all of that goes as planned, I will only have 3 more flights before my next check ride for final contact! So, I could potentially already be checking by next Wednesday, only 1 week after my mid-phase check. Life is so crazy fast right now! I am definitely looking forward to this weekend, I am so worn out. And being sick last weekend and most of this week did not help either. But, I can really see how the Lord had everything worked out so well ahead of time, I just had to trust in Him and he worked everything out perfectly in a way I could not have foreseen; just with the whole situation with being sick, some extra events that were thrown in last minute, and others that were slightly delayed, this week just worked out perfectly.

And I'm finishing up studying for tomorrow's EPQ right now. If I don't pass this one I'll go on PRO CAP(a bad-boy list of sorts) for failing last week's EPQ as well, and getting sat down on Monday as well for the standup EP. They are just so hard to study for as it's a TON of material and they tend to ask the most random and nit-picky questions. Oh well, Lord willing I'll be able to pass that tomorrow and avoid the annoyance of the CAP.