Training the Best

In the spirit of my new career path, I've decided to rename and move the blog. Not like there's a legion of fans out there who are going to lose interest in the blog if I change the address. I think the fans I have are pretty dedicated.

The new address: http://helodriver.blogspot.com/

The new name will be "Beating The Air Into Submission" because that is the affectionate description given by helo pilots for how they defy physics on a daily basis. I first heard it in a quote from a salty old Marine Corps pilot; ”Live to fly and love what you fly regardless of whether it sucks and blows or beats the fucking air into submission." A cleaned up version of this quote is the tagline for my e-mails.

I'm starting to warm up to the idea of being a helo pilot. It's hard to let that jet guy mentality go and "resign" yourself to slogging it out with the unwashed helo masses. Jet guys like to think that they are smarter than the helo guys and they are better sticks; better pilots. They may be able to fly mach 2 and calculate fuel flow to the tenth of a pound per hour in their head, but I know a lot of the guys in jet school right now and I can tell you they are not higher level thinkers. What they proved by getting jet scores in primary is that they are better at the Navy system of flight school. They study the procedures quickly, commit them to memory well, and regurgitate them on demand. They play the game; they give the instructors what they want when they want it. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; that is the way to get through flight school the Navy way. It's probably the best way to go from college student to pilot in only six months.

But it's not the way I want to fly. Maybe I'm still too stubborn and I may have to get over that in helo advanced, I may have to play the game, but I'd rather have a feel for the aircraft and know what to do rather than applying mnemonics and knee jerk procedures. If one more fucking simulator instructor tells me to verbalize my 6Ts and every checkpoint I'm going to fucking choke him out with his fucking headset cord!

I know that most of the readers of this blog aren't going to enjoy reading this, but I like the low level danger of the helo mission. Jets live high, out of the reach of most anti-air artillery and missiles. Helos don't have that option so they do the next best thing; fly low and fast. I've gone as fast as 290mph in the T-34C but I was up at 8,000' and I can tell you that there is no sensation of speed. Now down low at 1000 feet and 200 miles per hour there is a bit of a sensation of speed. Take that down to 100 feet and the trees really start whipping by. Eventually I'll fly at that level with the lights out and night vision goggles. Every platform has its specialty and specific thrills and like I said, speed is relative.

So the new goal is the AH-1W Cobra. It's the Marine Corps' attack chopper and it is a nasty little bird. It is the smallest in the inventory but by far the deadliest. It has 2 hard points on each wing, each of them can carry either a rack of 4 Hellfire anti-tank missiles, 4 TOW anti-armor missiles, a pod of 70mm Hydra unguided rockets, or a pod of 127mm Zuni unguided rockets. Under the chin is a 20mm chain gun with 750 rounds on board that is slaved to the gunner's helmet so that where he looks, the gun points. Better be sure you really want to get his attention.

There is currently a development program underway to upgrade our entire fleet of Cobras to the AH-1Z Viper model. The most obvious advancement will be the new four blade configuration instead of the old two blades which will increase the max speed to 210 knots from 170 and will greatly reduce the noise produced by the Viper. Inside there will be transmission and engine upgrades along with the most advanced avionics and targeting systems. When it comes out, it will be the most technologically advanced and fastest attack helicopter in the world, more advanced than the much talked about Apache of the Army.

The second choice would be the CH-53E Super Stallion, the heavy lift helicopter of the Marine Corps and the most powerful helicopter in the western world. Three 4,380 horsepower GE tubofan engines drive the 80' diameter, seven blade rotor head which produces enough lift to allow this 33,000lb helicopter to lift 16 tons of external cargo. It is 100 feet long and almost thirty feet tall. I saw a window decal in Pensacola that covered almost the entire rear window of the jeep that it was on with a stenciled picture of a CH-53E and below it read "33,000 pounds of steel and sex appeal." Another sticker I saw somewhere read "Don't fuck with me, I can lift your house." One of our instructors at VT-28, a CH-53E pilot, when asked what he flew answered "god's machine." They may not make movies about heavy lift, but they are damn impressive aircraft.

After six monts of my mother asking me to take some pictures here in Texas I finally did it. Expect pictures of me in front of the TH-57 in March '07 sometime. 

Yeah, that's how we roll here in Texas. 

Well looks like I'm going to be a helicopter pilot! I know that everyone was under the impression that jets were my one and only dream, and as recently as six months ago I posted it in my blog myself, but I've learned a lot in the interim.

Jets are sexy and fast and sound cool when you tell a girl at the bar that you are a jet pilot, but they are a lot of work. And you don’t get to fly that much. I am not trying to say that I wouldn't take a spot in jet school if it was offered to me right now, I'm just saying that I'm not crushed that I am not going to fly jets.

I've come to realize the kinds of people in the jet community are not necessarily my kind of people either. All the marine jet pilots I have met have been pretty much assholes and they constantly talk about how competitive the community is. And a lot of the students that I know who have gone on to be jet pilots are assholes too. A lot of people who are more concerned about themselves than anyone else. I'm not sure I want to be a part of that. I love flying, and I love the Marine Corps, but there is a lot more to my life than work. I really think I'm going to be happier day to day in a helicopter squadron.

The other part of the equation is that helicopter pilots are a much more integrated part of the Marine Corps than jet pilots. Yes, jets are a valuable combat asset and they bring a lot of firepower to the battlefield, but if you ask any infantry officer they would rather have a section of Cobras on station over a section of Hornets any day. Hornets don't have the gas to hang around and, as my friend Genetti said, by the time the guys on the ground know they are there, they have run out of gas and have to go home.

So the bottom line is this. Yes, jets were my goal here and I fell short of that. But I don't want to hear anyone say "oh, I'm sorry." I'm not. I am happy becoming a helicopter pilot and I'm looking forward to learning to fly something that physics says can not fly.

Just got back from flying some night visual navigation hops last night and decided to take some time to post an update.

Things are looking good for selection on Tuesday. As long as the weather holds out, I'll fly the first cruise formation flight tomorrow and then an out and in for the last two cruse form flights. And that will be my last flight in the T-34C.

Most likely, by the time that I come back as an instructor the Navy will have transitioned to the T-6 Texan II. It's about time, the T-34C design is thirty years old now and showing her age. They are still very capable aircraft and are well maintained, but they don't have the bells and whistles of modern aircraft. The GPS is ridiculous, the tiny monochrome screen and four knob design is terrible to use when in flight.

The T-34C does the basics very well, it is a stable and maneuverable aircraft, but when you get to the later phases of primary and especially when you take it on the road, it gets cumbersome. When you are flying around with the civilians, you do your talking over the VHF radio, which the T-34C was not originally equipped with. So they installed one on the right lower console near the back so that the pilot has to almost turn sideways in his seat to change frequencies on the damn thing. And beyond that the display is incredibly small so it's really hard to read. I have no idea why they couldn't put the controls on the dashboard where they'd be easy to access.

Forms have gone really well, I have thoroughly enjoyed them. I picked up the eye and touch necessary to fly good, tight formation early and have had a lot of fun since. Civilian pilots almost never get to fly formation; it is almost exclusively a military thing. Yet another bonus to doing this flight thing through the military.

We flew our safe for solo checkride on Friday morning and it all went really well until we decided to come home. When I checked the automated weather service over the radio, the winds were being called as coming from 360 at 8 knots but the active runway was still 13. The runway heading is the magnetic direction that it points rounded off to the nearest tenth and you always want to land into the wind. We have runways more suitable to a 360 wind here in Corpus, we have 35 and two 31s (left and right), but for some reason tower still had us landing on 13. Eight knots isn't so bad, but it's not ideal.

So I flew in course rules and proceeded for the break. I kissed off my partner and rolled the plane into a 45 degree angle of bank turn to begin the break. In hindsight I remember that the plane slowed down a lot more rapidly than normal and this should have clued me in to just how stiff the winds were. (Since you head back up the runway in the downwind leg for landing, I was heading 310, almost straight into the wind.)

I hit the end of the runway on the downwind and started to roll in for landing. I made my call to inform tower that I was at the 180 with my gear down and locked and they responded with "winds variable at 8, cleared to land." Just in passing, I thought to myself "variable my ass, you guys have the wrong runway active and you just don't want to change it", but I didn't think an 8 knot wind would be too difficult.

Things quickly started to go bad. I had put in my normal angle of bank to get to the runway and I was not turning fast enough. I could see the runway centerline coming to meet me and I did not yet have my nose pointed down the runway; I was still in the turn. I turned harder but down low with the gear down we are limited to 30 degrees angle of bank. I locked the plane in at 30 but it just wasn't enough. I was rapidly drifting right of centerline and since the wind was a tailwind I was very high, almost 650 feet when I needed to be at 450.

Since I was now very high and drifting dangerously close to 13 Right I decided that it was time to wave off. No one wants to wave off, especially when you are in a form flight and your partner is behind you, but there is no reason to try and save a bad landing. I powered up, pulled the flaps up, and made the call that no one likes to make; "Ranger 814 is waving off."

My ego was quickly mended because no sooner than I had leveled off at 500 feet I heard my wingman over the radio "Ranger 815 is waving off." I found out after the flight that they had seen what happened to me and the instructor told him to turn hard early but he still was not able to save the approach. My wingman's instructor came over the radio and told tower "That's a dead tail wind, tower." They got the message, because while I was downwind for my second try they alerted everyone in the pattern and on the ground that they were going to switch the runway to 31.

The second approach was a lot better because I knew what the winds really were and was able to compensate for it. I flew further down the runway on downwind and turned hard early. My instructor told me that he was checking the GPS groundspeed readout as I rolled in for the landing and my indicated airspeed was 95 knots but my speed over the ground was 110 knots. That means that if the wind really was coming from 360 it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 23 knots, or if it was coming from 310 (a 100% tailwind) then it was 15knots. Needless to say we didn't make the first taxiway.

The solo was pretty cool, but it was not standard at all. Ninety percent of flight school we use runways 13 left and right because the winds are always out of the southeast coming in off the gulf. And for all five of the formation flights we flew prior to solo, we had used 13. The active runway was still 31 since we had only been on the ground for about an hour and I was very rusty on my course rules for 31. I felt like a first month contact student, sweating a runway change and wishing they would just change it back to 13 where I was comfortable. But after a quick review of the course rules book, I had it down.

We flew out to the working area and did our thing without incident. The coolest part was coming back in over the beach. There were a lot of people on the beach and we flew over in a three ship parade formation. Now I know that people around here see us fly over all the time, but I fly these damn things and I still think it is cool to look up and see two planes in formation, let alone three. Maybe some kid down there was inspired. Seems to be a theme in my writing. Oh well.

I flew last night for some night navigation training in the local area. We are supposed to get at least one night navigation flight on cross country but since we got stuck in Birmingham overnight and had to fly home the next morning I didn't get one in. Operations is dead set on me selecting on Tuesday so they scheduled both of my night nav flights last night to get them out of the way.

There are two night navigation routes around here, one that circles to the south of Corpus Christi and one that circles to the north. Since it was Saturday night and my instructor didn't want to fly any longer than we had to, he proposed that we cut one checkpoint out of both routes, combine them, and complete both on one flight. I had no arguments; flying at night is a lot of fun, but when you're at the end of a twenty flight two week stint and it's Saturday night all you want to do is get it over with.

We took off out of Corpus International and flew over NAS Corpus Christi to start the route, but we first made a stop over my instructor's house. He had just had some concrete poured and wanted to see what it looked like from the air so he took the controls and did some 60 degree angle of bank circles over his house. Sometimes it's good to be a pilot. My onwing used to enjoy flying over his house on the Sunrise transition and chopping the power to idle when directly overhead because his wife said it got "really loud" when he did that. I can see myself doing that.

Night navigating here in south Texas is actually pretty easy; there is nothing else out there. You fly over once cluster of lights, turn to your next heading, and clear as day is the next cluster of flights and your next destination. That's how you navigate at night; by city lights and airport beacons. Every airport has a green and white rotating beacon that marks its position at night and they are very clear at night.

My instructor spent most of the night talking over the ICS about college, OCS, TBS, life in the Navy, whatever came to mind. The flying was not especially challenging for me and had to be excruciatingly boring for him. All in all it was fun.

So now I've got today off to study for cruse forms. We'll fly in the local area tomorrow and hopefully go on the road Tuesday to College Station or Houston. A good way to end primary.

Yep, that's me in the lead. By luck of the draw, I was issued one of our T-34s marked with Marines on the tail instead of Navy. With only about 70 hours of flight time and only about six hours of formation flying, SNAs fly the formation solo. It's just you and your partner, twenty feet apart at speeds as fast as 230 mph and as low as 1000'. The picture was taken by my roommate who was riding in the chase plane piloted by our instructor.

Not much time to write tonight, I've got a 0640 brief for my formation solo check ride and the solo formation flight immediately following that. Got to get some sleep tonight.

Once again things have sped up. Since I finished RIs and am close to finishing Primary, my name went up on the big board as eligible to select in the near future. I am projected to finish on Tuesday so that I can select on Thursday. It's possible, but I've done a lot of flying to get it done. I flew six flights last week, had Saturday off, and then flew two flights Sunday night. I'm scheduled to fly two form flights tomorrow and unless a massive thunderstorm moves in we'll get them done, which makes seven flights in five days. I'll likely fly Saturday and Sunday as well, then finish with two night flights on Monday night. When it's all over with that will be twenty flights in two weeks. Lots of flying.

I finished aerobatics last week and started formation flight this week. It's pretty hairy, flying that close to another aircraft, especially when there's a seven foot propeller spinning at 2200 RPM out there on the front of your plane. We fly with ten feet of step down, twenty feet of nose to tail separation, and four feet of wingtip separation. It's not the closest I will fly in formation, but it's pretty damn close for your first time.

My form partner is a Navy guy from a class much further behind than mine and he hasn't finished RIs yet. As a result he's being dragged along for the ride, hustling through the nine formation flights in the syllabus. I'm not sure if it's a good thing for him or not. By not having any time between our flights it means that we don't have time for our skills to get rusty, but it also means that there isn't much time to catch up on your studying if you are behind.

As a result, my partner, Ensign Novellino, struggles at lead. We alternate who is lead and who is wingman for each flight, and he is a fine wingman. Go figure, the squid is good at following the Marine. There are a lot more responsibilities as lead; you are responsible for the radio communications and getting the flight out to the working area. Once we are out there, we execute a sequence of turns, change positions twice, and conduct a break up and rendezvous before conducting a lead change. So the guy who is wing on the way out does get some time as lead in the working area, but once we are done in the working area, lead is given back to the lead on the way out to the working area and he takes the flight home.

It's fine though, I enjoy having the lead. Besides the whole thing of being the one in charge, I'm better at it than he is and the flight goes better when I'm in lead.

One of the cooler things we do is the break up and rendezvous. It's just to practice breaking out of formation, say to roll in on a target and drop some bombs, then joining back up to a circling lead. When it's time to go lead gives the hand signal for the B&R, your arm straight up and down with two fingers extended circled three times. Once wing nods his head to acknowledge that he have received and understood the signal, lead "kisses off" by placing his fist next to his helmet then pushing his hand towards wing while extending all five fingers.

As soon as the signal is given, lead breaks into a 45 degree angle of bank turn away. After lead passes abeam wing's wing, he turns and gives chase. All of my instructors love to say "go get him!" when it's time to break. It does look pretty cool to see another aircraft bank like that and turn away from you. Then to go and chase him down is even cooler. We get to do it again when we come in to land. We stay in formation as we fly over the runway at 1000' and lead kisses off to do the break. It's really cool to see from the ground too.

That's all for now, no time to slack off right now. As soon as I finish tomorrow I'll have to start studying cruise forms. But I'm ok with it because this time next week I'll be done with Primary and have my next assignment. Life is good.

After thirty seven long days, I finally finished the Radio Instruments phase of flight school with my I4390 check ride. Even though it was almost 1130 at night I was so happy I called Bela and my sister. Hopefully not waking either one of them up. Sorry guys, I just had to tell someone.

For the past five weeks I have studied my ass off and gotten my ass kicked daily in flights and simulators while my room mate has chilled on the couch and played video games. He's been in PAs and Forms (formation flight), which are a lot less study intensive. Now the tables are turned as I start back up with PAs tomorrow and he will likely start RIs this Friday.

This has not been a fun part of flight school. It is a lot of fun learning all of this cool stuff and actually taking my aircraft on the road to fly with the big boys, but the pace at which we have to learn this crap is ridiculous. At the beginning of the initial six days of classes, Instrument Ground School, our instructor informed us that we were going to learn the equivalent of a semester college class in the five days of class we had. Friday was the final exam so that didn't really count towards the learning.

It is really amazing how much I have learned in the past month. My roommate has to ask me to translate when I talk about the flights much like my friends and family do all the time. I remember hearing people talking about RI stuff in the ready room when I was in contacts and having no idea what the hell they were talking about. Now I'm the one speaking greek. That part is cool, realizing how much I have learned in such a short time. When I started this phase of flight school I couldn't tell you what the hell an approach plate was. Now I can explain everything on the plate and even shoot the approach.

The final event is the I4390 flight. The I designates that it is an instrument flight and any 4390 flight is a "check ride" in which an instructor quizzes you and challenges you to see if you really know all that you are supposed to. The briefs are twice as long because he spends most of it drilling you with questions about the tiniest details pertaining to the flight. Then the flight is peppered with questions about limitations, tolerances, rules, regulations, etc. There is also extra pressure because if you fail the flight you immediately go to an initial progress check flight with the XO or CO which is one step away from being attrited from the flight program.

My instructor, Lt. Temkin, is known as a tough grader and a real pain on the checkrides. He has been the lowest grader on average for the last two quarters. A fellow marine, 2ndLt Weisman, flew his 4390 with him on Wednesday night and I had occasion to talk to him on Thursday afternoon and get some gouge from him. That came in handy because there was a particular question that Temkin asked that I would not have known had Weisman not told me about in advance.

Since I am in need of night hours, we were scheduled to brief at 1900 and I was the only one in the ready room. Lt. Temkin walked in and joked that I must be his student because I was the only one there. He asked if I was an instruments expert and I replied that I didn't know if I was an expert, but I knew enough to be dangerous. He laughed a little.

I tried something new this time. In the past I have dreaded check rides, not slept well before them, been restless the entire day before. This time I told myself that I was good at this stuff, I know what I am doing, and I was going to take him for a ride just like any other RI flight. In the past the brief was my downfall; if I didn't have a good brief it would kill my confidence and that would cloud my mind for the flight, resulting in a lot of mental mistakes. I decided that wasn't going to happen this time.

Temkin laid it on me in the brief. Some of my classmates described the I4390 as a walk in the park, just another RI flight, and some had even knocked out their 4390s on their cross countries. Technically they are not allowed to do that, but they did. Temkin asked me questions about rules, airspace, the IFR charts, lost communication procedures, you name it. I didn't know everything, but I knew where to look for the answer when I didn't. In the past that may have rattled me but I wasn't going to let it get to me this time. I kept talking to him and kept establishing that I was confident and ready. I think that did a lot for the rest of the flight. So much of flight school has involved psychology. From dealing with the crotchety old men in the simulator building to fooling instructors into thinking that I know more than I really know, my psychology classes have served me well.

As we taxied out to the run up area, Temkin sprang the question on me that I think was his ace in the hole. There is a point on the taxiway that is intended for pilots to check their TACAN receiver for accuracy. I think it was mentioned once in IGS and I hadn't studied it since. But thanks to Weisman's tip I knew exactly what it was and the tolerances. I played it up, pausing a little for some of the numbers like I was trying to recall them. I didn't want to tip him off completely, but I think I rained on his parade by knowing the answer. He didn't say much after that.

The flight went very well; I flew smoothly with very few mistakes. Because it was 9 o'clock at night, there was very little radio traffic to compete with and the air was smooth. It was great. Temkin is one of those instructors that have to have something to complain about, and since my flying was good he had to pick out nitpicky things to complain about, at one point complaining because my airspeed was 4 knots off. It wasn't really a mistake, I was descending to correct a slight altitude deviation, but I let him have his little victory.

It is especially satisfying as a student to see an instructor screw up. We don't normally take the approaches in for a touch and go because we are flying from the back seat and aren't allowed to land the plane form the back seat as students. Temkin chose to take the controls at the end of each approach so that he could get some night touch and goes in. On the first one he pulled the nose up too hard and got rudder shakes, a warning that he was close to stalling the aircraft. I laughed to myself a little.

The final approach I shot was a PAR (precision approach radar). A controller on the ground looks at a special radar scope and gives you constant guidance as to your position left or right of course and above or below glideslope. The radar is precise enough to take you all the way down to only 100' above the ground with zero visibility. I have to say my heart would be beating hard if the altimeter read 150' and I still hadn't broken out of the clouds, but we can do it.

We had requested two PARs just in case I didn't do well on the first one, and since I had done well Temkin took the second. When you are on a PAR and doing well, all the controller says is "on glideslope, on course" over and over again. It's music to a pilot's ears. That was pretty much all I heard while I was flying my PAR. Such was not the case for Lt. Temkin. He started 100' high, was not on airspeed on the descent, and required a lot more course and glideslope corrections than I had. He was never unsafe and landed just fine, but I had done it better than he had. That made me smile.

During our debrief he of course harped on the things I had screwed up, but he couldn't take away from me that I had flown it well. That felt good, but the part that really felt good was having the weight of RIs off my shoulders. If I make it to jet school I'll have even more RIs to do and will have to do them three times as fast but that's neither here nor there. For now they are done!

So after a very brief stay in Charlotte I headed to the airport at 1230 on Sunday to begin the trek home. Even though the cross country is a lot of fun and it was good to see everyone, the primary purpose is for training. There are six graded flights to be completed and it is another day at work for me. Since I am working hard right now to get jet grades, the stress is on for every flight. I wanted to get hammered, go out and have a good time with my friends in Charlotte, but I couldn't because I had to be in flying shape on Sunday. There'll be time after Primary for that.

When we got out of the car at Wilson Aviation, the place where the private aircraft park in Charlotte, there was a regional jet sized aircraft on the flight line with United States Marine Corps emblazoned in huge letters across the side. My first thought was holy crap, the commandant is here and I haven't had a haircut in a week. I met him once before in TBS, but I didn't want to meet him with my Navy looking haircut and wearing my smelly flight suit. Hell, my Navy instructor had a more marine like haircut than I did. Thankfully the aircraft was taxiing out and according to my instructor, who had met them, it was only carrying a couple of majors who were in Charlotte for some annual training.

So I got to take Taylor, Kris, and Taylor's boyfriend Jeff out to the plane. I was hoping to have more time to show them the plane and even let them get into it, but there was time pressure to get airborne in order to get home before the 2200 cutoff back in Corpus. I don't know if Taylor was impressed or just confused by all the gauges and stuff inside. Kris didn't say much and Jeff was busy trying to act unimpressed. Guess I'll have to bring a real jet to Charlotte to impress him.

Startup and takeoff in Charlotte were uneventful. We had to taxi all the way across the field from 36R to 36L. It's strange how often they change runways in Charlotte. I'm used to Corpus where the duty runways are always 13L and 13R unless a storm has recently passed through, and even then it just changes to 35. Eight runways here and we really only use three of them.

I did get my first experience with snotty controllers and waiting in line though. We waited in line behind three regional jets and watched three or four heavies land before we were cleared to take off. Here in Corpus you have to check in with tower when you get to the hold short line, but when I checked in with Charlotte tower I got a snotty hold short reply. Well I knew that I was going to hold short, that was never in question, but I guess the unspoken rule in Charlotte is to keep quiet, they know who you are. Noted.

Since we were departing VFR, we were given instructions to climbout on a heading of 270 which meant a 90 degree left turn immediately after takeoff. I didn't know it at the time, but Kris and the family had hightailed it over to the observation area overlooking 36L and my left turnout took me almost right over their heads. If I had known they were there I would have delayed my turn and given them a 45 degree AOB turn. Oh well, some day.

And once again there was confusion with air traffic control. I had filed a VFR flight plan complete with six or eight checkpoints but for some reason when I checked in with clearance delivery they filed a direct flight plan for me. So when I started my turn to my first checkpoint approach control got their undies all in a twist wondering where I was going. As I flew the plane my instructor dealt with them and finally got things straightened out. It wouldn't be the last bit of confusion.

Flying on a visual navigation route over South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama isn't the easiest way to get from point A to point B. There were many long stretches of nothingness, just trees and farms, which are of course not on the map. I didn't get lost though, through maintaining heading and timing we arrived at every checkpoint.

Because of our fuel card fiasco in Birmingham on the way to Charlotte, my instructor told me that there was no way in hell that we were landing there again even though I had already planned the route to land there. It wasn't a big deal; I just planned another leg to land in Tuscaloosa, another thirty miles away. Unfortunately, as we got closer, the weather refused to cooperate with us. A massive thunderstorm cut us off from our route and we had to turn to the north to avoid it. We radioed the flight service station to pick up an IFR clearance into Tuscaloosa, but it very shortly became obvious that wasn't going to happen. A thunderstorm had set up right over the field and we were running low on gas. There were no other fields of a reasonable size in the area for us to land at so we had to land in Birmingham yet again.

When we checked the weather a convective sigmet had been issued for the area so we decided to borrow the FBO's Cadillac to go eat dinner and wait it out. It was pretty funny rolling into the Olive Garden in a flight suit. Of course it was in Birmingham, so I wasn't exactly underdressed.

We returned from dinner to find that the hours on the sigmet had been extended so I retired to the snooze room. They really had it labeled as such, the "snooze room." It was in the back of the FBO and consisted of a mostly dark room with two couches and two recliners. It was awesome. Every FBO should have a snooze room.

But after an hour long nap, my IP woke me up to tell me that the sigmet had been extended yet again and we were staying in Birmingham for the night. We stayed at the Pickwick hotel in Birmingham, which was pretty nice but showing its age. No big night out though, I just watched some TV and went to bed.

So we tried again at 9 in the morning. This leg was to be another visual navigation flight, this time down to Acadiana Regional Airport in New Iberia Louisiana. Yeah, in the middle of nowhere. The place was run down and looked like you would expect a crop duster airport in the middle of nowhere, but for $2 they offered a really good lunch of shrimp gumbo on white rice, two pieces of seasoned blackfish, a mozzarella stick, veggies, and a coke. The field is pretty cool too; there is a water filled ditch there for seaplanes to land. A seaplane did land while we were taxiing back out to take off, but he had wheels on so he landed on the hard surface runway.

So finally we took off from Acadiana and we were on our last leg. I was ready for the cross country to be over with by that point. My ass was killing me, I was tired, and it was hot. All I wanted to do was land and get the hell away from that plane. We had been burning gas at the rapid rate on the low level visual nav flights so we planned to do the majority of the flight at 8,000' to improve our gas mileage and then pick up the visual navigation on the last part of the flight.

I never thought I would be so happy to see the Gulf of Mexico. I don't ever want to move back here, there is nothing appealing about this part of the country, but on that day the Gulf signified that the end was near. But like I said, the cross country is training so we had to do some holding and shoot an approach before we could land. So there I was, only ten miles from home, doing laps in holding. But finally it was over, we began the approach and I saw the glory of the runway numbers on 13R.

After taxiing back to the flightline my instructor checked us back in with Ranger base and there was a pause. "Say again the call sign?" was the response. Obviously he was a little confused about who we were and why he didn't know that we were airborne. It took a bit of clarification to convey that we were the cross country that was overdue. I found out later that we were not the only one. The cross country flight to Denver that weekend had been grounded in Amarillo, TX when one of the two aircraft going there had an attitude gyro failure. They had to send one of the twin engine training aircraft with parts and mechanics up to meet the stricken aircraft. The second plane returned on Monday evening and the one with the attitude gyro failure returned on Tuesday.

I was so glad the cross country odyssey was over, but glad I had gotten to do it. It really sucked to have so little time in Charlotte and being tired the whole time but it was great to fly myself to Charlotte and get to see Charlotte at all. I'll get some time off soon and get to spend some time having fun.